Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Navy Times
September 15, 2008
Pg. 12
Winter wants Zumwalt, but will settle for Burke, in this year’s budget
By Philip Ewing
A week before lawmakers were to return from their summer vacations and resume business on Capitol Hill, Navy Secretary Donald Winter said he hopes they fund a surface warship in this year’s budget — as long as it’s a destroyer.
While he’d prefer a third Zumwalt-class destroyer, Winter said he’d be happy if lawmakers funded an older Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.
In a Sept. 4 interview at the Pentagon, Winter told Navy Times that the Navy has a major stake in keeping U.S. shipyards healthy so they’re able to keep the employees and production gear in place to keep building warships.
“This is a very important part of our fleet, and we have to be mindful of the need to continue to invest and to maintain the industrial base that supports that investment and production activity,” he said. “In many aspects, making certain that we have — I’ll just say, a destroyer — in the [fiscal 2009] budget is more important than whether that’s a DDG 1000 or a DDG 51. I want a surface combatant this year.”
Over the past spring and summer, different Navy officials have espoused different views of how many copies of what kinds of ships the Navy should build. The Navy initially asked Congress for a third DDG 1000, but skeptics on Capitol Hill balked at Navy promises that the service could control shipbuilding costs. House lawmakers deleted the ship from their version of the bill. Supporters in the Senate continued fighting for it.
Then the Navy announced during a congressional hearing in late July that it no longer wanted that ship and would truncate the Zumwalt class after two copies and resume building DDG 51s. The Navy’s top requirements officer told lawmakers this was because the Zumwalts couldn’t carry certain surface-to-air missiles or fight submarines as effectively — an apparent reversal from more than a decade of planning, and despite protestations from defense contractors and lawmakers interested in building more Zumwalts.
When Senate lawmakers pressed the Defense Department to get involved with acquiring the third ship, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a former secretary of the Navy, reassured them the Navy had been “directed” to pursue the third ship.
Winter said that “within the building,” meaning the Pentagon, the sea service has reached a consensus for what it wants this year — a surface warship — and what it will ask for as it plans for future years.
“Everybody’s got their own little impressions and beliefs and, ‘I’d rather this, I’d rather that,’ but in the end, I think we would be able to make good use of a DDG 1000. That is what is in the president’s budget request on the Hill right now, and I’m hopeful that we can get the political support to enable us to acquire an additional DDG 1000 in ’09.”
Complicating matters is Winter’s prediction that the Navy’s budgets will either remain steady or decline in coming years, as Congress funds other priorities and “political changes” occur in the administration.
He laid out his prediction, as well as a vision of the Navy’s importance to the 21st century’s international trade networks, in the September issue of the U.S. Naval Institute magazine, Proceedings.
Tomorrow’s likely funding cuts mean the Navy must trim as much cost as possible from its shipbuilding budgets, and it must cut everywhere else it can, Winter wrote.
“The truth is, there is no silver bullet solution to this financial problem. We must figure out how to build a more cost-effective fleet. Crew size, availability and the cost of maintenance are also significant factors in maintaining the Navy.”
With the exception of the Virginia class of attack submarines — the latest of which, the New Hampshire, was delivered Aug. 28, ahead of schedule and $40 million under budget — almost every other new warship program has cost and schedule problems.
An August report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded Navy shipbuilding was “in serious disarray” and that “the costs already are high enough to make the U.S. Navy the greatest single peacetime threat to the U.S. Navy.”
Winter’s column offered a few suggestions for driving down cost: more efficient manufacturing, as in the Virginia class; and shipboard automation, to take costly sailors off warships. He also exhorts Americans to tell their congressional representatives to support peacetime shipbuilding so the Navy can build its fleet before it faces the threats of the future.
The Navy has to resolve its shipbuilding questions before it can get to the other topic of Winter’s article — the need for the Navy to defend the world’s interconnected, relatively delicate network of trade.
As economies become specialized and companies rely on their goods arriving “just in time,” rather than maintaining large inventories, Winter told Navy Times, it becomes more important that the Navy protect the international network of trade, almost all of which moves by sea.
A single attack somewhere in the system — which doesn’t even need to do actual damage — can cause billions of dollars’ worth of ripple effects, Winter warns, unless the U.S. and allied navies provide constant presence to protect against such shocks. Energy and insurance prices spiked precariously in 2004 after a failed attack on an oil platform in the Persian Gulf, he wrote, even though the attackers caused no damage.
“Just the threat of perturbation can be felt worldwide,” Winter told Navy Times. “You no longer even have to wait for a shipment to be delayed, you just respond to the news.”
Since America relies heavily on maritime trade carried mostly by foreign-flagged ships, he said, “We have no alternative but to make sure it’s all protected.”
September 15, 2008
Pg. 12
Winter wants Zumwalt, but will settle for Burke, in this year’s budget
By Philip Ewing
A week before lawmakers were to return from their summer vacations and resume business on Capitol Hill, Navy Secretary Donald Winter said he hopes they fund a surface warship in this year’s budget — as long as it’s a destroyer.
While he’d prefer a third Zumwalt-class destroyer, Winter said he’d be happy if lawmakers funded an older Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.
In a Sept. 4 interview at the Pentagon, Winter told Navy Times that the Navy has a major stake in keeping U.S. shipyards healthy so they’re able to keep the employees and production gear in place to keep building warships.
“This is a very important part of our fleet, and we have to be mindful of the need to continue to invest and to maintain the industrial base that supports that investment and production activity,” he said. “In many aspects, making certain that we have — I’ll just say, a destroyer — in the [fiscal 2009] budget is more important than whether that’s a DDG 1000 or a DDG 51. I want a surface combatant this year.”
Over the past spring and summer, different Navy officials have espoused different views of how many copies of what kinds of ships the Navy should build. The Navy initially asked Congress for a third DDG 1000, but skeptics on Capitol Hill balked at Navy promises that the service could control shipbuilding costs. House lawmakers deleted the ship from their version of the bill. Supporters in the Senate continued fighting for it.
Then the Navy announced during a congressional hearing in late July that it no longer wanted that ship and would truncate the Zumwalt class after two copies and resume building DDG 51s. The Navy’s top requirements officer told lawmakers this was because the Zumwalts couldn’t carry certain surface-to-air missiles or fight submarines as effectively — an apparent reversal from more than a decade of planning, and despite protestations from defense contractors and lawmakers interested in building more Zumwalts.
When Senate lawmakers pressed the Defense Department to get involved with acquiring the third ship, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a former secretary of the Navy, reassured them the Navy had been “directed” to pursue the third ship.
Winter said that “within the building,” meaning the Pentagon, the sea service has reached a consensus for what it wants this year — a surface warship — and what it will ask for as it plans for future years.
“Everybody’s got their own little impressions and beliefs and, ‘I’d rather this, I’d rather that,’ but in the end, I think we would be able to make good use of a DDG 1000. That is what is in the president’s budget request on the Hill right now, and I’m hopeful that we can get the political support to enable us to acquire an additional DDG 1000 in ’09.”
Complicating matters is Winter’s prediction that the Navy’s budgets will either remain steady or decline in coming years, as Congress funds other priorities and “political changes” occur in the administration.
He laid out his prediction, as well as a vision of the Navy’s importance to the 21st century’s international trade networks, in the September issue of the U.S. Naval Institute magazine, Proceedings.
Tomorrow’s likely funding cuts mean the Navy must trim as much cost as possible from its shipbuilding budgets, and it must cut everywhere else it can, Winter wrote.
“The truth is, there is no silver bullet solution to this financial problem. We must figure out how to build a more cost-effective fleet. Crew size, availability and the cost of maintenance are also significant factors in maintaining the Navy.”
With the exception of the Virginia class of attack submarines — the latest of which, the New Hampshire, was delivered Aug. 28, ahead of schedule and $40 million under budget — almost every other new warship program has cost and schedule problems.
An August report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded Navy shipbuilding was “in serious disarray” and that “the costs already are high enough to make the U.S. Navy the greatest single peacetime threat to the U.S. Navy.”
Winter’s column offered a few suggestions for driving down cost: more efficient manufacturing, as in the Virginia class; and shipboard automation, to take costly sailors off warships. He also exhorts Americans to tell their congressional representatives to support peacetime shipbuilding so the Navy can build its fleet before it faces the threats of the future.
The Navy has to resolve its shipbuilding questions before it can get to the other topic of Winter’s article — the need for the Navy to defend the world’s interconnected, relatively delicate network of trade.
As economies become specialized and companies rely on their goods arriving “just in time,” rather than maintaining large inventories, Winter told Navy Times, it becomes more important that the Navy protect the international network of trade, almost all of which moves by sea.
A single attack somewhere in the system — which doesn’t even need to do actual damage — can cause billions of dollars’ worth of ripple effects, Winter warns, unless the U.S. and allied navies provide constant presence to protect against such shocks. Energy and insurance prices spiked precariously in 2004 after a failed attack on an oil platform in the Persian Gulf, he wrote, even though the attackers caused no damage.
“Just the threat of perturbation can be felt worldwide,” Winter told Navy Times. “You no longer even have to wait for a shipment to be delayed, you just respond to the news.”
Since America relies heavily on maritime trade carried mostly by foreign-flagged ships, he said, “We have no alternative but to make sure it’s all protected.”