Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
4/10/2015
If the Navy does not receive additional funding for the Ohio-class Replacement (OR), the next-generation ballistic missile submarine would consume about half of the shipbuilding budget during procurement, the shipbuilding base will be “severely degraded,” and the full battle force inventory will fall short of the amount required by the 2012 Force Structure Assessment (FSA), the Navy warns in a report to Congress publicly released on April 3. The March paper, completed by the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and titled the “Report to Congress on the Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels for Fiscal Year 2016,” echoes several statements uttered by top service officials of the OR as the Navy’s highest shipbuilding priority.
The Navy intends to procure the first SSBN in Fiscal Year 2021, the second in FY 2024, and one each year between FY 2026 and FY 2035. “Although the Secretary of the Navy has made it clear he intends to protect shipbuilding to the maximum extent possible, if additional funding is not available to support the shipbuilding procurement plan throughout this period, knowing that the OR SSBN will be built, the balance of the shipbuilding plan will be significantly impacted,” the report notes. The Navy has estimated the total OR cost at $139 billion.
OR Would Consume Half of Shipbuilding Budget
Within the Navy’s traditional Total Obligation Authority (TOA), OR would consume about half of the shipbuilding budget for more than a decade, the report reads. While the Navy intends to procure 48 ships from FY 2016-2020, buying nine ships in both FY 2016 and FY 2019 and 10 ships for FY 2017, FY 2018 and FY 2020, respectively, the report states that, absent additional funding, OR could challenge the Navy’s preferred procurement profiles. “Since the [nuclear aircraft carrier] CVN funding requirements are driven by the statutory requirement to maintain eleven CVNs, and accounting for one OR SSBN per year (starting in FY2026), there would only be about half of the resources normally available to procure the Navy’s remaining capital ships,” the report states. “At these projected funding levels, Navy would be limited to on average, as few as two other capital ships … per year throughout this decade.”
Resulting shipbuilding rates would be too low to support the Defense Strategic Guidance laid out in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, and would pose “significant risk” to the industrial base, as the SSBN and CVN programs might not provide enough work to keep shipyards running at minimum levels, according to the report. The Navy could face difficulty in recovering lost inventories for the Fast Attack Submarine, the Large Surface Combatant, the Small Surface Combatant and Amphibious Force.
The Navy has programmed in the Future Years’ Defense Program $5 billion in research and development and another $5 billion for advanced procurement of ORs. The service has requested $161 billion total for FY 2016. Overall, the Defense Department requested $534 billion for next fiscal year, about $35 billion above the Budget Control Act spending cap. “There are many ways to balance between force structure, readiness, capability, and manpower, but none that Navy has calculated that enable us to confidently execute the current defense strategy within BCA level funding,” the report to Congress states. Funding and delivering OR is one of the most significant challenges to resourcing the shipbuilding program, according to the report. “[T]he DON views that the only way to effectively overcome these challenges while supporting the defense strategy is with increases in DON top-line commensurate with the funding required to procure the OR SSBN,” the paper states.
Rear Adm. Richard Breckenridge, Director of the Navy Warfare Integration Division, during a conference in Ogden, Utah, last month advised urging Congress to provide OR funding, but hinted that the Navy might have to look at exterior funding. He pointed out a general DoD rule of thumb which states that the Navy, Air Force and Army should be funded at equal levels, yet emphasized that the Army received increased funding during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and that the other two services garnered positively skewed funding during the Cold War, dictated by national security demands. “DoD may have to provide a solution where we look creatively at the one-third, one-third, one-third [for the Army, Navy and Air Force, respectively],” Breckenridge said. “I don’t advocate that at all. I’m tired of robbing Peter to pay Paul at the detriment of other types of important power for our nation’s security. So my goal is to wait in Congress, get them to treat our national security appropriately with the risk that they’re starting to see around the world without continuing to play this game of how we share resources that are too tight.” Navy senior leadership this year has repeatedly pled their case to Congress at several hearings that the OR could destroy the service’s shipbuilding account, without funding relief.
Congress authorized a Sea-Based Deterrence Fund into the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act to bankroll the Ohio-class Replacement separate from the Navy’s shipbuilding budget, but no money has been put in the coffer. The account can receive up to $3.5 billion in unobligated balances from FYs 2014-2016.
OR Could Compromise Navy Shipbuilding Numbers
While the Navy plans to boost its number of ships from 289 to 308 by the FY 2022-2034 period, lack of additional OR funding would cause the Navy to maintain only about 300 ships until the “mid-2040 timeframe,” after OR procurement finishes. Absent top-line funding, OR procurement could cause the perfect storm, as groups of ships procured in the 1980s will age out of their service lives and require retirement. “The convergence of these events prevents DON from being able to shift resources within the shipbuilding account to accommodate the cost of the OR SSBN,” the report states.
