The Navy is using expensive missiles to shoot down drones and missiles fired at its ships and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and needs Congress to complete work on the fiscal year 2024 supplemental request to fund the replenishment of these missiles or risk the service having to source from existing and future budgets, the Navy’s comptroller said on Wednesday.
The budget request for fiscal year 2025 delivered to Congress in March calls for 5.4 percent overall growth versus FY ’24, more than 2 percent higher than inflation rates, which is “real growth,” Russell Rumbaugh, assistant secretary of the Navy for financial management and comptroller, said during a discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.
“We’re gonna lose some of that real growth if we have to replenish those stocks, the Standard Missiles and Tomahawks that are built in Aberdeen, South Dakota, if we have to replenish those from within our own instead of Congress recognizing that this is an extreme situation and giving us [that] money,” he said.
Funds exist to purchase these missiles in the $95 billion supplemental bill, which the Senate passed in February to support Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel, Rumbaugh said. The House has not taken the measure up. Rumbaugh said the bill will make the Navy “whole” when it comes to replenishing missile stocks.
Should the pace of operations continue in the Red Sea, the Navy will have to be open to another supplemental bill for FY ’25 to allow the service to keep buying more missiles, he said.
The “admirals” have watched the high rate of munitions expenditures in Ukraine and “said, ‘We cannot have empty magazines,’” Rumbaugh said.
The Navy sought a 30 percent increase in its FY ’24 budget for munitions, and Congress came close to that but trimmed the request slightly “because they saw we had not successfully gotten the industrial lines up to speed,” Rumbaugh said. The FY ’25 request is seeking the same level for munitions, he said.
“Munitions are a big place we’re working on with the industrial base,” he said.
Congress also needs to pass supplementals for natural disasters, Rumbaugh said.
Super Typhoon Mawar, which hit Guam last May, caused the Navy to “lose ground,” he said. There is no funding in the Senate-passed supplemental to repair facilities on Guam, he said.
He said the Department of Defense was already challenged with building its operations on Guam given the island’s importance to U.S. presence in the Indo-Pacific region “and then we lose ground to a natural disaster.”