Despite recent opposition in Congress, the Navy is making a second push for the early decommissioning of seven Ticonderoga-class (CG-47) cruisers, saying Friday that the declining fiscal environment makes doing so now even more critical than when the idea was originally proposed last year.
The Navy this week sent shipbuilding plans to Congress that show plans to retire the seven CG-47s in fiscal 2015, a plan that quickly came under questioning on Capitol Hill. The Navy wanted to initiate decommissioning the cruisers in fiscal 2013, but lawmakers thwarted those plans and weeks ago restored funding for the modernization and maintenance required to keep the ships going.
Vice Admiral William Burke, the deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems, told House lawmakers that reduced budgets coupled with the impact of sequestration, which took effect March 1, further enhances the need to decommission the Ticonderogas.
“This was an extremely difficult choice for us to make but the fiscal situation has not changed for the better, it’s actually changed for the worse,” he told the House Armed Services Committee panel for readiness. “So we are even more challenged today than last year.”
Burke noted that the cruisers have 10 years of life left in the ships, that some are plagued by cracking in aluminum superstructures, and that all them are in need of “an awful lot of” maintenance and modernization. He said the money would be better spent on newer ships in the fleet that have been heavily burdened by a high operational tempo over the last 10 years and are also in need of maintenance.
“We would be better off using that money to buy back life on ships that have 25 or 30 years left in them than on those ships that have 10 years left on them,” Burke said. The newer ships are also facing a maintenance backlog and are “more capable going forward than those cruisers.”
The Navy had not made plans to begin modernization on the cruisers because the funding was only provided by Congress a month ago, Burke said. “I would expect that we will operate those ships as normal for the next couple of years and then we would decommission those ships.”
“We have to balance our books,” he said.
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