Center Roundtable Shows Need for Increase in Navy Budget
(Washington, D.C.): Today, as the Senate prepares to debate the Fiscal Year 1999 Defense
Authorization bill, the Center for Security Policy released a
Roundtable Discussion on one of the most important components of this legislation — and the
impact it could have on “The Future of U.S. Naval Supremacy.”
This half-day-long symposium drew more than 60 past and present senior military officers,
industry leaders and members of the press. It featured important interventions by, among others,
four Lead Discussants — Vice Admiral Al Burkhalter (USN, Ret.) who served
in a number of
senior positions in the U.S. intelligence community, including that of Director of the Intelligence
Community Staff; Admiral Wesley L. McDonald (USN, Ret.), former Supreme
Allied
Commander Atlantic and Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command; Frank J.
Gaffney, Jr., Director of the Center for Security Policy who acted as an Assistant
Secretary of
Defense during the Reagan Administration; and Ronald O’Rourke, an
internationally recognized
authority on naval matters who is a Specialist in National Defense at the Congressional Research
Service. The Roundtable was followed by a working luncheon featuring remarks by Keynote
Speaker Senator John Warner (R-VA), who has had a life-long and intimate
association with
the naval services in his capacity as an officer, as Secretary of the Navy, and now as Chairman of
the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Sea Power Subcommittee.
Key Insights
Highlights of the discussion detailed in the eleven-page
observations that:
Too Few Ships, Too Many Requirements
- “If you look at the FY ’99 budget, you will find that there is funding for 116
combatant
ships in the United States Navy …. [When] support ships are [factored in]
there will
probably be a total Navy of just over 200 in round figures.“
- “The Navy is spread awfully thin, not even awfully thin, but unable to respond in more than
about one area at the same time. It is really going to be very, very difficult to cover the
Korean theater, Southwest Asia, and any other hot spot that might come up, Latin American
or name any others that you can think of in today’s world. As the requirements continue
to
climb and the numbers come down, we are just going to be running out of people,
running out of ships, and into a business of non-responsiveness.“
- “For several years now, the Navy has, in fact, been procuring new weapons and
equipment at fairly low rates, rates that are below those which would be required to
replace the planned force on a steady-state basis, and this is particularly true in the key
area of shipbuilding.”
- “So, by the end of the Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP), we will be 29 ships
short of
the amount that would have been procured under a steady-state procurement policy ….
Last year, the Administration released to industry a projection of what it thought its
shipbuilding rate would be for the 12 years beyond the FYDP. That would be for the years ’04
through ’15, and it showed a projected rate of 6.3 to 7.7
ships per year, which is, again, below
the stead-state replacement rate.”
- “[If this situation persists] you will be 22 years into a 35-year shipbuilding
period,
at the end of which you will be 40 to 56 ships short of what a steady-state
replacement rate would get you to maintain a 300-ship Navy.”
Declining Readiness
- “With regard to the near-term portion, which is the part about maintaining near-term
readiness
while you undertake all these high-tempo operations, the Administration’s budgeting
strategy for all the services, not just for the Navy, has been to try to preserve funding for
current readiness, even at the expense of funding for procurement of new weapons and
equipment. But the Navy’s operational tempo for several years now has been very
high. In
fact, it’s been gliding upward at a slight rate for the past several years, and there is now
anecdotal evidence of difficulty in maintaining readiness in the fleet.”
- “In fact, an article in the Navy Times…that came out in the April 13th
issue…talk[ed] about
two different carriers going to sea with crews that were considerably short of what you
might expect to be on board a deployed carrier. A deployed carrier might have
somewhere between 5,500 and 6,000 people aboard. These two carriers went to sea with
4,600 people and 4,200 people. So the shortages were on the order of a thousand
people or
more.”
- “There have also been reports of ships that have had to return to port early for lack of
fuel or which have not been deployed because of lack of availability of fuel or other
sorts of repair problems among mine warfare ships and so on.”
A New Mission
The Roundtable Discussion focused attention on the emergence of an important new role for
the
U.S. Navy: the near-term deployment on the world’s oceans of effective and affordable missile
defenses.
- “One of the things that will absolutely, positively happen if someone decides to take
advantage of the vulnerability that was just discussed by putting a ballistic missile with
a chemical weapon or a biological weapon or a nuclear weapon on it into an American
city is that we will build a Navy-based missile defense system very rapidly. Cost will be
no object. Technology will be no limit. And, certainly, a treaty with a country that no longer
exists will no longer be considered a constraint.”
- “It will be the utmost tragedy if we wait until that happens to take such a step,
when by taking such a step now, we might prevent it from happening.”
What is Needed
- “…There is a growing consensus that [several] measures [the Navy is taking to reduce its
costs], though helpful, will not by themselves be sufficient to square this budget problem fully,
and this seems to be particularly the case in light of evidence that the readiness portion of the
Navy’s budget is also now coming under some pressure compared to the level of operations
that it is being asked to sustain.”
- “You need to probably look at increasing the Navy top line if these other
measures are not
going to be sufficient, and you can do that either by increasing the DOD top
line or by
increasing the Navy’s share of the DOD top line.“
The Bottom Line
The requirement for U.S. naval power in the post-Cold War strategic
environment — for
forward presence, power projection, littoral and open ocean sea-control and missile defense,
among other missions — will only continue to grow. The Center for Security
Policy’s
Roundtable Discussion highlights the necessity of squarely meeting that requirement — and the
real risks should the United States fail to do so. The Center urges both the executive and
legislative branches to reflect upon the findings of this symposium and to effect the needed course
corrections its participants have identified.
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