The Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) final fiscal year 2024 defense authorization bill includes a provision that would restrict Navy funds until it submits a new shipbuilding plan accounting for maintaining 31 amphibious ships.
The bill specifically would limit obligating or expending 50 percent of the FY ‘24 Navy Administration and Service-
wide Activities, Operation and Maintenance account until the Secretary of the Navy submits a new 30-year shipbuilding plan that meets the statutory requirement to maintain 31 amphibious ships.
The service submitted the latest long term shipbuilding plan earlier this year, but it did not incorporate any new Flight II San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships (LPDs) after LPD-32 due to a pause in the line while the Navy conducts a medium deck amphibious ship study directed by the Office of the Secretary of Defense due to cost concerns (Defense Daily, April 18).
The plan document noted the “analytics results of the medium deck amphibious ship study and the [Battle Force Ship Assessment and Requirement Report] will be reflected in future shipbuilding plans.”
LPD Flight II ships were meant to replace the aging Whidbey Island/Harpers Ferry-class ships the Navy is trying to retire several years early due to maintenance and repair cost issues. Without additional LPD-type ships after LPD-32 the long-term shipbuilding plan does not account for the amphibious force rising above 30 ships in 2029 and thereafter falling to 19 to 23 vessels by 2053, depending on each of the three plan options. The shipbuilding plan included two plans assuming little cost growth and a third with a very significant shipbuilding budget increase.
In March, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro argued the Flight II San Antonio-class ships were trending towards costing almost as much as a Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. He said he hopes the procurement pause and amphibious study would be completed “by either June or September, we’ll have the final answer to are there ways that we can perhaps bring that cost down a bit,” (Defense Daily, March 15).
However, recently retired Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger claimed when comparing to base dollars, or the inflation-adjusted year the program began, the ships are not rising in costs so much and that both services favored using multi-ship buys to drive costs down.
The SASC bill pushed for an increase in funding by $1.9 billion to fully fund the next ship in the class, LPD-33.
The committees’ bill report said DoD has “conducted extensive analysis of the LPD-17 class to redesign the ship to achieve cost savings. This resulted in the design of the Flight II ships…Marine Corps witnesses have testified that there are no capabilities excess to their needs in the Flight II design, but the Department has decided to further study whether the LPD could be redesigned to yield a ship that would be less expensive to acquire.”
The committee said given the Navy is unlikely to get major cost savings without “significant changes in capabilities,” it does not understand why DoD would stop producing LPDs without a replacement.
A July 10 White House’s Office of Management and Budget statement of administration policy arguing against the House bill’s version that incrementally funds LPD-33 with $750 million said it partially opposed funding “especially considering the shipbuilding plan would not require LPD-33 until FY 2025.”
In March, Jay Stefany, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition, told the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee that since the current HII [HII] production line is ideally geared to build the ships every two years and the latest vessel, LPD-32, was procured this year, the next vessel does not need to be bought until FY ‘25 (Defense Daily, March 29).
“So there is a period where we can look at a more affordable way of, potentially, to build those. We don’t need to build one in ‘24, we can take some time to see if there’s a more affordable way to build those before we buy the ’25 ship,” Stefany said at the time.
The SASC bill also would require the Navy Secretary to provide quarterly briefings to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on the operational status of the amphibious warship fleet starting Oct. 1, 2023 and lasting through September 2024. The briefings would include average quarterly operational availability, the number of days underway for training, days deployed, expected completion date of scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, and updates to any delays to completing maintenance.
Another provision would amend the U.S. Code to direct the Navy to adjust scheduled maintenance and repair actions to maintain at least 24 amphibious warships operationally available for worldwide deployment at any time.