Six senators are calling on the heads of a Senate panel to follow their House counterparts and bolster support for two major Navy shipbuilding programs in the defense budget.
The half dozen Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) members made their appeal to Subcommittee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Ranking Member Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) late last week, as the panel prepares to craft its version of the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill in two weeks.
They want the subcommittee heads to add authorized funding and legislative language to that bill allowing the Navy to buy a second Virginia-class submarine and a second DDG-51 destroyer next year, in FY ’14. The Navy previously planned to buy those two future ships before scaling back plans for each program to one ship each in FY ’14 because of budgetary constraints.
The six SASC members–Sens. Jeanne Shaneen (D-N.H.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Jim Webb (D-Va.), and Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii)–argue supporting the two added ships is fiscally prudent, and note the DDG-51 addition would not require more money in FY ‘13.
“Particularly during this extraordinary period of fiscal constraint, we have a responsibility to carefully consider funding mechanisms to increase the number of combat-capable ships that can fulfill unmet U.S. joint combatant commanders’ requirements at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers,” they write to Reed and Wicker in a May 3 letter.
They want to grant the Navy multi-year procurement authority to buy 10 Virginia submarines from FY ’14 to FY ’18 as well as 10 DDG-51s from FY ’13 to FY ’17.
Such authority “establishes stability across the industrial base, results in more efficient production, and produces substantial savings for the taxpayers compared to annual procurements,” the six senators write.
To increase the Virginia program to 10 submarines from FY ’14 to FY ’18–from the nine the Pentagon’s budget request currently supports–the SASC also would need to add authorization for advance-procurement funding in FY ’13 and allow the Navy to incrementally fund the added FY ’14 vessel. Navy acquisition chief Sean Stackley has said such a setup allowing for the added submarine would cost the service roughly the same as sticking with plans to buy nine of them.
The SASC is likely to allow this Virginia submarine change, considering Reed pledged his support for it during an April 19 hearing. The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) also is poised to approve the added submarine when it marks up its FY ’13 defense authorization bill this Wednesday.
The bill before the HASC also grants the Navy the multi-year authority for the 10 DDG-51s that the six senators who wrote to Reed and Wicker want. The senators note in their May 3 letter that granting the multi-year DDG-51 procurement authority would require no additional FY ’13 funding. They said the Navy could potentially save enough money with a 10-ship multi-year buy, compared to a nine-ship plan, to support the addition of the 10th ship.