By Emelie Rutherford
Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), a former three-star Navy admiral, said he hopes the service’s recent decision to seek one more DDG-1000 destroyer next year will give him more time to gather the intelligence and analysis driving the Navy’s request to stop the nascent ship’s production.
The freshman lawmaker said in an interview that despite his probing he has not come to terms with what has changed in the Navy, since he left two years ago, to lead it to want to truncate its buy of the stealthy DDG-1000 destroyers with advanced guns for near-shore warfare.
The Navy revealed last week it is no longer seeking to end the DDG-1000 line immediately–and will not change funding for one more destroyer in fiscal year 2009, bringing the total to three DDG-1000s. The service, though, is still seeking support in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill for the controversial plan it unveiled in July to stop DDG-1000 production and build eight more of the older DDG-51s starting in FY ’10.
“I think the Navy made the right decision in this recent proposal to stay with [the third] DDG-1000, because there are too many questions, in my mind, strategically, cost[- wise], and analytically, to make a leap like this to a different thrust,” Sestak told Defense Daily last week. “I don’t think that’s due diligence and good government. So that’s why I believe keeping this next ship going is the better of two courses to go.”
At a congressional hearing with Navy officials last month, Sestak critiqued the process the Navy used to come to its new plan to build more DDG-51s–which he called a “strategic sea change”–unveiled just months after the service advocated publicly for building all seven planned DDG-1000s.
“I can’t say the Navy’s wrong in what they’re wanting to do, I just don’t know enough,” he said last week, pointing to the new revelation–used as an argument against buying all eight DDG-1000s–that the destroyer’s hull cannot be used for the future CG(X) cruiser.
“There was a lot of analysis done, some of it on the very, very high classified level, about what DDG-1000 would portend for CG(X), and whether that hull form could or could not be used,” Sestak said. “There was, when I was in the Navy, a lot of belief that the hull form could be used. And I would like to see the analysis, at a fairly high classified level, that shows it could not now.”
The congressman said while he held two roles in the Navy–as deputy chief of naval operations for warfare requirements and programs (N6/N7) in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and as director of the assessment division (N81) in the office, when Adm. Vern Clark was CNO–there “was a lot of emphasis upon removing ‘the man’ from determining what the Navy needed and placing analysis, analytical analysis, with very intense modeling.” Only after such analysis would any Navy officials argue for or against the plans, Sestak said.
He said the DDG-1000 issue goes to the heart of a major concern of his, which is questioning: “Are we building a military that analytically is based on analysis, not on man’s decision, but analysis that said, ‘This really is analytically what we need, and the men and women agreed to it who are warriors?'”
The congressman said he has “not seen the analysis that…could lead me to believe that DDG-1000 could not both provide what we need in the littorals, help us in the anti-air- warfare mission–air-defense mission–and, third, was not a timely platform to the CG(X) that could provide defense against ballistic missiles at sea.”
Sestak said he also is keenly interested in getting “in more deeply [to] the analysis on the intelligence side that appears to have driven this decision.” He said he wants to learn about such intelligence from agencies beyond the Defense Department, because he said agencies can differ on their interpretation.
“I saw some” intelligence, he said. “But I also know that when I was looking at the analysis (when I was in the Navy), some of it was very interpretive at the time.” He said he hopes to see more intelligence regarding the ballistic-missile threat that the service has said is driving its desire for more DDG-51s.
Navy shipbuilding officials told lawmakers at the July 31 hearing of the House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee, that their altered plan to buy DDG-51s instead of DDG-1000s resulted partly from a threat assessment showing a need for combating adversaries with improved blue-water capabilities and ballistic missiles, for which they said the DDG-51 is better suited (Defense Daily, Aug. 1).
Lawmakers advocating for more DDG-51s, including HASC Seapower Chairman Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), argue the DDG-51s would cost less than the DDG-1000s, and therefore buying the older destroyers would help the Navy reach its goal of a 313-ship fleet faster.
The DDG-1000s and DDG-51 programs are shared by General Dynamics‘ [GD] Bath Iron Works (BIW) in Maine and Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] Ingalls shipyard in Mississippi.
Sestak said he believes strongly that “strategy should drive the Navy,” though he said it doesn’t always. He questioned shifting the platform for the Navy’s primary surface combatant in the coming years because of the number of ships desired.
If purchasing of defense systems is based on proper analysis, he said, “we could probably…have a much more capable force with less capacity, less units, if we invested in the right items.”
Like other skeptical lawmakers, he also questioned the accuracy of the DDG-51 cost estimates the Navy has provided.
Sestak cited unanswered questions he has about the Navy’s new destroyer plan–including if and how it ties to any change in the service’s thinking on seabasing, distributed anti-submarine warfare, and fire support for Marines on land from ships in the littorals.
Sestak, who advocated for the DDG-1000 while in the Navy, said he has become more involved with the DDG-1000 debate than with any other naval issue since he entered the House last year.
He has met one-on-one with CNO Adm. Gary Roughead, had discussions about Navy processes with other lawmakers, and met with industry representatives on both sides of the DDG- 1000/DDG-51 debate. He continues to seek briefings and background materials from the Navy and intelligence community, he said.
“I just felt I didn’t have enough information to say this was the right course, even after all I’d done,” the congressman said. “So I’m still pursuing this, particularly the intelligence….[Because] I believe there should be a coherent strategy and a coherent analysis behind it, and not just all of the sudden be moved to the left because intelligence is telling them something.”
Sestak lauded Roughead for having “the courage to challenge long-abiding analysis on this DDG-1000,” and said the Navy could not be better served “at such a critical time.”
Sestak has said repeatedly during this destroyer debate that he is concerned with the credibility of the process the Navy used–not with the people making the decisions.
“This is what I’m concerned about for our services, that we have processes that have lost their credibility, and therefore the military will be harmed in the future when they’re asking for items in a budgetary environment where less is going to be available potentially,” he said.
The Navy’s latest request to Congress for one DDG-1000 in FY ’09 is far from a done deal, considering some powerful House members support instead buying a 10th LPD-17 amphibious ship in FY ’09. The defense authorization and appropriations bills are both still being hashed out on Capitol Hill.
Sestak retired from the Navy in January 2006, following 32 years in the service, and soon after started campaigning for Congress (Defense Daily, Feb. 13, 2006). He emphasized he “did not run in order to focus upon the Navy,” and instead ran on issues including health, education, and economic security.
When asked, he acknowledged he is mindful about how much he delves into Navy issues in Congress. He said he only asked to be on the HASC Seapower subcommittee because a Boeing [BA] facility is in his district, and he wanted to be involved in talks about the company’s V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.
Once he arrived on the subcommittee, Sestak said he was “conscious that just because I was a former admiral, that that did not give me automatic credibility.”
“I feel I should not be…somebody who springs up all the time, because I’ve been there and I can tell you what it is,” he added. “There’s a lot of good men and women who have worked on the defense committee that look at it from a broader sphere then I’ve looked at it in the Navy.”
Yet he said be believes the subcommittee assignment also gives him the responsibility to “do due diligence in what’s coming before (the subcommittee), because I have been fortunate enough to gain insight into some of the processes why which we do decision-making in defense.”
He said that decision-making includes “the good, and what I call the tyranny of optimism”–where officials make decisions they are not financially sound and ask those holding the purse strings to trust them.
Sestak is running for reelection this fall to his second term in Congress.