The planned increase of the Navy’s presence in the Asia-Pacific region will largely be done by procuring new ships rather than by reducing the fleet in other vital areas of the world, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said recently.
Currently about 55 percent of the Navy’s force is based in the Pacific while 45 percent is Atlantic oriented, but those numbers will “gradually” shift to more along the lines of 60 to 40 percent favoring the Pacific as the Pentagon executes a new global strategy, Mabus said at a conference hosted by Credit Suisse in Arlington, Va.
“We’re going to try to do most of that from new builds,” Mabus said. “We’re going to be putting ships that are coming out of the shipyards into the Pacific, because we still have vast responsibilities, particularly in the Middle East.”
Part of the plan will be stationing at least one Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) in Singapore. Two LCSs have been delivered to the Navy. Construction of 20 is already under contract with the builders of the two variants, Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Austal USA. The Navy intends to build 55 in the long run.
The Obama administration unveiled a revised global posture strategy in January that puts greater emphasis on the Asia-Pacific, even as the number of ships in the Navy’s fleet in five years is expected to remain at today’s level of about 285. Mabus said, however, he expects the fleet to reach 300 ships by 2019–below the 313 ships envisioned several years ago.
The Navy is undergoing a review of its force structure following the administration’s revised global strategy. Mabus said the Navy was working through the new 30-year shipbuilding plan and it would be released “very soon.”
A critical aspect of the plan will be incorporating the next generation of costly ballistic missile submarines (SSBN-X) while minimizing the impact on other shipbuilding programs, he said. In its fiscal 2013 budget proposal and five-year procurement plan outlined last month, the Navy said it would delay starting construction on the first SSBN-X vessel, originally planned for 2019, by two years. The move is estimated to save $4.3 billion over the next five years.
The SSBN-Xs are to replace the Ohio-class fleet of boomers scheduled to begin retirement at the end of the next decade, but could also add significant pressure to the shipbuilding budget for other programs.
“If we took that out of our normal shipbuilding account it would have a dramatic, adverse impact on the rest of the fleet,” he said, before adding: “Not only on the rest of the fleet, but on the industrial base that builds the rest of the fleet–including attack subs.”
Mabus said the Navy intends to sustain a shipbuilding rate that will keep the industrial base stable, but in return expected the contractors to bring ships in on time and budget, and to apply lessons learned from previous builds. He pointed out cost overruns on the ongoing construction of the Gerald R Ford (CVN-78) aircraft carrier, the first in the class of the same name being built by Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] at its Newport News Shipbuilding yard in Virginia. Mabus said the Navy has been withholding fees that were to be paid to HII to account for the increased costs.
He faulted the Pentagon’s deviation from a plan 10 years ago to phase in all of the new technologies for the class over the first three ships to minimize risk. Instead, the Pentagon changed the plan and crammed all of the “brand new” systems into the first ship, thereby increasing the potential for technical problems and cost growth, he said. That added complexities that delayed not getting the construction contract done until 2008 with only 30 percent of the design complete, he said.
“That is not the way to build a ship. That is not the way to build a weapon system. It is not the way to build anything,” Mabus said. “So now you have, understandably, cost overruns.”
The Navy’s fiscal 2013 budget request seeks $811 million to pay for cost overruns on the Gerald R Ford, which is about halfway complete, and another $608.2 million for the first year of construction on the next carrier, the John F Kennedy (CVN-79).
The Gerald R Ford was projected to come in at a cost of about $11 billion. Rear Adm. Thomas Moore, the program executive officer for aircraft carriers, said media reports suggesting the ship could cost more than $12 billion were probably accurate. That figure, however, includes $3.7 billion in research and development costs and another $3.3 billion in design costs that will not be non-recurring and apply to the construction of the rest of the carriers in the class.
Moore added the Navy has begun to rein in the cost growth. “We have some cost stability,” he said.