The House Armed Services Committee’s readiness and seapower panels plan to hold a joint hearing Jan. 18 to scrutinize how the Navy will remedy problems that led to a series of ship mishaps last year, a key congressman said Jan. 10.
The hearing will examine two recent reviews of those accidents and ask the Navy how and when it intends to implement their recommendations, said Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), chairman of the seapower subcommittee. Navy Secretary Richard Spencer and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson are both expected to testify.
The House panels also plan to seek a progress report from the Navy every 90 days to ensure the matter continues to receive adequate attention, Wittman said at the Surface Navy Association’s annual national symposium.
The Navy’s “Comprehensive Review of Recent Surface Force Incidents,” released in November, and the “Strategic Readiness Review,” conducted for the Navy by an independent review group and released in December, found that the Navy took shortcuts in maintenance and training to meet high operational demand. The Navy initiated the reviews after a rash of ship accidents last year, including two collisions in the Pacific that killed 17 sailors.
Wittman outlined a series of steps he believes are needed to improve the Navy’s readiness. He said the Navy can no longer put off the “deep-dive maintenance” that ships are supposed to undergo every seven to 10 years.
Keeping ships deployed for 20 years is often “not enough to make sure we are reestablishing the material readiness of those ships,” he said.
Wittman also endorsed organizational reforms, including unifying the Pearl Harbor-based U.S. Pacific Fleet and the Norfolk, Va.-based U.S. Fleet Forces Command under a single entity. The two have remained separate due to legislation advanced by the late Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii).
“We have this mentality of an East Coast Navy versus a West Coast Navy, and that has to be put aside,” he said.
Wittman, who supports the Navy’s goal of expanding its 280-ship fleet to 355 ships, urged congressional appropriators to fully fund the 13 ships allowed under the fiscal year 2018 defense authorization act. He would like to see “more than 13 ships” funded in FY 2019.
Wittman also wants to see larger block purchases of ships to increase economies of scale and improve the Navy’s ability to plan. For guided missile destroyers, for example, “instead of buying 10 at a time, let’s buy 15,” he said.
With the Coast Guard and Navy jointly pursuing the purchase of heavy polar icebreakers for the Coast Guard, Wittman said there is bipartisan congressional support for moving ahead but that such an acquisition should not come at the expense of Navy shipbuilding.
“Where [does] the money come from for construction?” he asked. “That’s going to be the challenge for us.”
Also at the symposium, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), a Marine veteran and a member of Wittman’s subcommittee, urged the Navy to “tell its story” more often to build public support for budget increases. He said a recent trend toward more secrecy across the Department of Defense is a “catastrophic” mistake.
“Despite the old adage that loose lips sink ships, non-existent strategic communications can sink entire navies,” Gallagher said. “If the bias is toward silence to prevent adversaries from finding out about unique capabilities or potential weaknesses, guess what? There will never be a public constituency for acquiring or mitigating them. And by the way, our adversaries probably have a decent idea of what we’re up to anyways.”