By Emelie Rutherford
The heads of a naval panel in Congress said they expect to remain focused next session on ensuring more Navy ships are nuclear powered, hammering out the service’s destroyer-building plans, and examining the design of the Marine Corps’ developmental Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV).
Also, trying to control costs with the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program remains a major priority, said House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) and Ranking Member Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.). LCS concerns are so pressing, Taylor said, that if House members return to Washington for a “lame duck” session in November, he hopes to hold a subcommittee hearing on the program’s cost-drivers, including whether the engine on the first ship is the most economical.
Taylor and Bartlett spoke to Defense Daily about their work on the Seapower subcommittee during the 2007-2008 session of Congress, which wrapped up early this month, and plans for it during the session that starts next January, assuming they retain their posts.
The fiscal year 2009 defense authorization bill awaiting President Bush’s signature grants the service’s LCS request for $920 million for two ships and lifts a cost cap for one year, while the recently signed appropriations act boosts the two-ship funding to $1.02 billion.
Taylor said he was not happy about lifting the LCS cost cap, which emerged from House-Senate negotiations.
“We want to be looking at some of the major cost elements of the LCS, and see if we can’t do a better job through competition,” he said in a phone interview. He wants to learn if reports he’s heard are true that say there is a cheaper and viable alternative to the engine used on LCS-1, the Lockheed Martin [LMT]-built ship delivered to the Navy last month.
“We want to take a look at some of the other cost drivers, big expensive things that go on the ship, and see if we can’t do a better job through the acquisition process and literally push the Navy acquisition guys to defend some of those decisions, and if they can’t defend them make some changes that will save the nation some money, and to the greatest extent standardize the equipment between the two versions of the LCS,” Taylor said.
Bartlett, in an interview in his Capitol Hill office, said he is distressed there was never an analysis of alternatives that spurred the LCS, and that the Navy’s original plan to enable the ships’ mission packages to be changed during the fight never panned out.
“They just gave that up. They never even mention it,” Bartlett said about swapping mission packages during fighting.
He added he wants to look next session at the Navy’s lack of a medium-lift helicopter, which he said is needed to swap LCS mission packages and also for search-and-rescue missions and medical evacuation.
Bartlett said a major victory this past session was securing language in the FY ’09 defense authorization bill mandating that future Navy big-deck amphibious ships be nuclear-powered. The FY ’08 version of the legislation, thanks to pushing from Taylor and Bartlett, also calls for future Navy cruisers to have nuclear propulsion.
“I’m very pleased that we’re moving to a more nuclear Navy; that was my vision and dream,” Bartlett said, citing the long-term cost savings and operational and tactical advantages of nuclear power over traditional propulsion.
“The only reason for not doing this is that we do not have a capital account,” he said, because that would spread the initial high costs of building the nuclear ships over several years and thus lower sticker shock, and thus resistance. He hopes to look in the next session at creative ways to fund the construction of the nuclear ships.
“We want to start pushing as much money as we can toward the development of the nuclear cruiser sooner rather than later so that they hopefully can avoid the kind of problems they had with the LCS by rushing the program too much,” Taylor said.
The Navy’s controversial proposal to end the DDG-1000 destroyer line and restart construction of the DDG-51 combatants will continue to be an issue. The FY ’09 defense authorization bill includes the full $2.5 billion for buying a third–presumably final–DDG-1000, while the appropriations act includes roughly 60 percent of the monies for that ship.
Taylor and Bartlett were behind the push to end the DDG-1000 line at the two ships on contract.
“We did give the Secretary of the Navy the discretion of moving that (DDG-1000) money (in the authorization bill) and I think at the end of the day they build 51s with it,” Taylor said, describing a move that would likely face opposition in the Senate.
Taylor believes three of those ships could be bought for the price of one DDG-1000, and that putting that money toward the DDG-51s would speed up working on the nuclear-powered cruiser.
Bartlett said he never would have voted for the existing two DDG-1000s if he knew that their hull would not be used for the future CG(X) cruiser, as previously planned. And he said he was not satisfied even when the Navy wanted to build seven DDG-1000s–down from earlier plans for 32 of the ships.
“[A collection of] seven ships is not a class,” he said. “It’s nothing more than a technology-demonstration program. And two or three or seven are all the same thing when it comes to a technology-demonstration program. You don’t need more than two….The 51s would be just as good a technology-demonstration platform.”
Bartlett said he remains “very concerned” about the Marine Corps’ EFV. He and Taylor prodded the service last year to redesign the developmental amphibious vehicle to provide better protection on land from underbelly mines–possible via a V-shaped bottom like the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP) has–and are not happy with a detachable-armor solution the service proposed. The Marine Corps and contractor General Dynamics [GD], meanwhile, are moving forward with plans to build new EFV prototypes.
“We’ve got to address it as soon as we get back,” Bartlett said, adding he wants the Marine Corps to look at reconfiguring the EFV engine and making changes to provide better blast protection for passengers.
“I’m not inclined to buy something that’s very expensive that’s vulnerable to mines,” Taylor said.
Looking back over this past session, Taylor noted the Seapower subcommittee’s oversight and support of the MRAP program, which he said will continue, and success in adding ships to the White House’s budget. He is happy that the panel “really laid down a mark to the Navy that we want them to do a better job of maintaining and keeping [ships] they have.” Taylor said he and Bartlett hope to travel in November to visit ships the Navy wants to decommission, “to see if we think that’s the right thing to be doing.”
Looking ahead, Bartlett said he would like to learn more about Chinese shipbuilding efforts, see “true competitiveness in shipbuilding” in the United States, and explore building smaller and cheaper ships that can be partially controlled from afar and thus require far fewer people on board.