By Dave Ahearn
The Navy for years has built far fewer than the average number of ships annually required to expand the U.S. fleet to 313 vessels, and now is reaching a point where it would be quite difficult to exceed that average level by a wide enough margin so that the 313-ships goal can be reached, an analyst said last week.
Rather than being on course to expand the current fleet of 280 ships and submarines to 313, the shipbuilding pace of recent years has the Navy on course to plunge down to a fleet of 200 vessels or fewer, according to Ronald O’Rourke, specialist in naval affairs with the Congressional Research Office (CRS).
He presented his views last week before a forum of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, examining the massive Chinese military buildup and U.S. military capabilities; in an interview with Defense Daily after the forum; and in two CRS reports newly updated this month, the 28-page “Navy Force Structure and Shipbuilding Plans: Background and Issues for Congress” (Order Code RL32665), and the 120-page “China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities — Background and Issues for Congress” (Order Code RL33153).
Attaining a 313-vessels fleet (which still would be little more than half the number of ships in the 1980s) is a goal cited by several successive top Navy uniformed leaders, chiefs of naval operations.
According to O’Rourke, these are the salient numbers:
The United States in recent years has built an average of just 5.3 vessels a year, ranging in this decade from four vessels in one year, five vessels in two years, to a peak of eight in one year.
Continuing at this shipbuilding pace will “take us down below 200” total vessels in the fleet, rather than rising to 313, he said.
To be sure, he said, it is possible for the nation to build fewer ships each year than the construction pace required to reach the 313-ships goal, but that in turn would mean that the Navy thereafter would have to build substantially more than the average number required for several years, in order to reach the 313-vessels goal.
Thus, given the slow shipbuilding pace of recent years, O’Rourke said, “We would need to build 12 ships a year [for the next] 19 years.” (His table shows the Navy wouldn’t begin procuring a dozen vessels a year until fiscal 2012, if indeed congressional appropriations in those years and later were sufficient to purchase that many.)
More daunting, he added, nine of those 12, or 75 percent of all ships built, would have to be larger vessels, not smaller and cheaper ships such as the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).
An LCS, which the Navy once intended should cost $220 million each (not including costs of interchangeable mission modules to increase LCS capabilities) will cost double that or more. Yet even though the cost of the LCS more than doubled, even if each one cost $500 million, that still is about one-sixth the cost of a next-generation DDG-1000 destroyer.
Taking a broarder view, O’Rourke pointed to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) figures that also call into question whether the 313-ships goal will be attained. While the Navy has spent on average $12.6 billion annually since fiscal 2003, CBO estimated this month that the Navy 30-year shipbuilding plan would tally up to something more like $27 billion yearly–twice the Navy spending pace, one O’Rourke report shows.
The point here is, more ships and other military hardware may be required to counter a rising threat.
After the old Soviet Union collapsed, many U.S. military programs saw huge funding cuts called a “peace dividend” on the assumption that no nation could rival the United States.
But the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in this decade has embarked upon an explosive military buildup, buying advanced fighter planes, hundreds of missiles, Russian Sovremenny destroyers, and several classes of submarines including the Jin-class, a nuclear-powered boat equipped with nuclear-tipped ICBMs with a range of almost 5,000 miles.
O’Rourke said in viewing the Chinese military buildup, it is well to recognize that this isn’t an instantaneous shift from having primitive capabilities to advanced potential. “It’s not like a light switch” being flipped from off to on, he said.
Rather, “different aspects of this capability may come on line at different points in time…and some of the elements of their naval capabilities or their maritime warfare capabilities…will be able to do things, even while other parts are not ready,” he said.
He zeroed in on the People’s Liberation Army Navy and its fast-growing submarine fleet, and other new Chinese hardware that could be used to deter American forces.
For example, if China makes good on its threat to invade Taiwan unless it submits to Chinese rule, a U.S. president might not have the option of sending U.S. Navy carrier groups into the Taiwan Strait to block Chinese forces, as was done in the 1990s.
Among other capabilities, China now has roughly 1,400 missiles pointed toward the strait, according to a Taiwanese estimate, weapons that could target and destroy non-stealthy U.S. ships. Super-stealthy, radar-evading U.S. air power might have to take out those missiles before the Navy could gain entry to the strait, according to some military analysts.
O’Rourke indicated the Chinese submarine force is becoming a competent, modern asset.
“Their submarine force…they already have some relatively modern submarines, and they already [have a] force that, once it is competently managed and proven and efficiently operated, would in and of itself–along with some long-range cueing system–pose a potential significant anti-access issue for U.S. or other intervening naval forces,” he said.
“And in that regard I think it’s somewhat instructive to remember the [problem] that the British navy had with a single German-built Type 209 submarine operated by the Argentine navy during the Falklands [Falkland Islands] war in 1982.”
Thus, he said, formation of a formidable Chinese submarine force, to some degree, in terms of raw force structure, “is already there.”