Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Newport News Daily Press
April 28, 2008
Pg. 1
Some question why the Navy is fixated on having 313 ships
By David Lerman
Second of two parts
WASHINGTON -- The Navy's plan to produce a future fleet of 313 ships is getting panned on Capitol Hill.
Many say the long-range plan to increase today's fleet of 279 ships and reverse decades of decline is unaffordable and unrealistic. Few think that the Navy will find the billions of additional dollars needed each year to build the ships it wants.
Almost lost in the debate over financing and shipbuilding schedules is a more fundamental question that goes largely unaddressed: What is the rationale for 313 ships, and what kind of fleet does the Navy need in the 21st century?
That question - so pivotal to the fortunes of shipbuilders like Northrop Grumman Newport News - remains unanswered, in the view of many defense analysts.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Navy at times has appeared uncomfortable discussing its vision of a future fleet and its ideal size.
Navy officials have described the 313-ship total as the minimum number of ships required to confront potential threats in 2020.
But when pressed to give an estimate of the optimal number of ships that the modern Navy should possess, Navy leaders politely decline.
"We're doing some work to see what that might be," Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, told reporters this year.
The uncertainty over naval requirements has frustrated lawmakers and analysts, who worry that the public case for a robust shipbuilding program suffers from a lack of clarity and conviction.
"The Navy has not done a capable job of explaining why it wants 313 ships or how it intends to get to that goal," said Loren Thompson, a prominent analyst at the Lexington Institute who has close ties to Pentagon officials. "There's a lot of disagreement right now about whether the fleet we're buying has any relevance to the future."
By most accounts, today's fleet - the smallest in a century - is too small for comfort.
Navy officials say all critical missions around the globe are being met. But combatant commanders have also requested more ships than are available at times, particularly in the case of attack submarines.
Some lower-priority intelligence and surveillance missions have had to be ignored, commanders have reported, because of a lack of subs.
"There's always a higher demand for presence than we have in theater" or available in any given region, said Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources.
Many lawmakers who oversee Navy matters say they fear that even 313 ships will leave the future fleet strained to confront all the threats it might face in the global war on terrorism.
"I believe the number should be substantially higher," said Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. and a former Navy secretary who quit his Pentagon post in 1988 to protest a downsizing of the fleet.
But how big is big enough?
No one argues that the Navy needs to return to President Ronald Reagan's vision of a 600-ship fleet. Advances in technology have made today's ships far more capable than their predecessors of a generation ago.
In 1991, in thePersian Gulf War, the Navy had 526 ships. But only 35 were capable of firing Tomahawk cruise missiles, which hit Iraqi buildings with impressive accuracy, the National Journal reported. Today, the Navy has 74 such ships.
As technology improved and shipbuilding budgets declined, the fleet gradually dwindled and Navy estimates of requirements became more vague.
For several years, the Navy declined to specify a fleet size but spoke mostly of 260 to 375 ships.
Defining precise fleet requirements has been made more difficult since the end of the Cold War, experts say.
When the overriding mission was to deter a Soviet navy, regular peacetime deployments to the Mediterranean and the Pacific dictated a force of 15 aircraft carriers, said Norman Polmar, a noted naval historian and author.
Because each carrier required specific numbers of ships to escort it for protection, determining the size of the fleet became largely a matter of simple arithmetic.
But with the demise of the Soviet Union and a new focus on terrorism, fleet requirements have been tougher to define.
The Navy's 30-year shipbuilding plan - a 12-page document made up mostly of charts - offers little substantial discussion of the rationale for a 313-ship fleet.
It refers broadly to a maritime strategy of winning the nation's wars, deterring adversaries, limiting regional conflicts and fostering cooperative relationships with international partners, among other things.
It also says a 313-ship fleet "incurs risk" in such key areas as ballistic missile defense, intelligence and surveillance work, and strategic deterrence.
Any detailed threat analysis would be classified, but critics say the plan offers little insight into how the Navy should transform itself for the future.
"I don't see any real analysis of what the Navy needs," Polmar said.
"I just don't know the direction the Navy's going in. I don't understand it."
Perhaps the most dramatic challenge to Navy thinking and force planning came in 2005 from the Pentagon's former Office of Force Transformation.
That office, made up of defense reformers, foresaw the decline in shipbuilding money and urged a new focus on smaller, lower-cost ships to expand the fleet.
"This report calls into question the viability of the long-standing logic of naval force-building," it said in its opening line.
The report called for eight new ship designs, including a smaller aircraft carrier, to produce a much larger fleet of 558 to 846 ships.
In an age of terrorism, the report argued, a larger fleet of small, agile ships would prove more useful against multiple ever-changing enemies.
"The enemy could have difficulty determining what to expect and how to defeat them all," the report said.
That study, however, was largely ignored at the time. And the Navy has rejected smaller aircraft carriers, saying they would save little money while offering less combat power.
Nonetheless, the Navy has, in fact, focused on the need for small fast-attack vessels as a major addition to the future fleet.
At the heart of the 313-ship plan - and the reason that today's fleet would expand - is the addition of the littoral combat ship, a new small fast ship designed to fight in waters close to shore.
The plan calls for buying 55 littoral combat ships, making up more than a sixth of the future fleet.
But development of the new ship got off to a rocky start. Two competing designs by General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin were rushed into production, and costs about doubled for the first two models. The Navy then canceled the third and fourth ships to reform the program.
Lawmakers, meanwhile, are raising new questions about the trade-off between high-capability ships and a larger fleet.
Some House members, for example, are pushing to forgo buying an expensive destroyer next year, so they could restart production on an older-model destroyer that might be made more cheaply and yield more ships.
Analysts note that such issues remain unresolved, but they say the ultimate size of the fleet is unlikely to stray far from what the Navy has proposed.
"It's a balanced fleet that tries to hedge its bets in a lot of ways," said Robert Work of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "To me, it's a reasonable plan."
April 28, 2008
Pg. 1
Some question why the Navy is fixated on having 313 ships
By David Lerman
Second of two parts
WASHINGTON -- The Navy's plan to produce a future fleet of 313 ships is getting panned on Capitol Hill.
Many say the long-range plan to increase today's fleet of 279 ships and reverse decades of decline is unaffordable and unrealistic. Few think that the Navy will find the billions of additional dollars needed each year to build the ships it wants.
Almost lost in the debate over financing and shipbuilding schedules is a more fundamental question that goes largely unaddressed: What is the rationale for 313 ships, and what kind of fleet does the Navy need in the 21st century?
That question - so pivotal to the fortunes of shipbuilders like Northrop Grumman Newport News - remains unanswered, in the view of many defense analysts.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Navy at times has appeared uncomfortable discussing its vision of a future fleet and its ideal size.
Navy officials have described the 313-ship total as the minimum number of ships required to confront potential threats in 2020.
But when pressed to give an estimate of the optimal number of ships that the modern Navy should possess, Navy leaders politely decline.
"We're doing some work to see what that might be," Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, told reporters this year.
The uncertainty over naval requirements has frustrated lawmakers and analysts, who worry that the public case for a robust shipbuilding program suffers from a lack of clarity and conviction.
"The Navy has not done a capable job of explaining why it wants 313 ships or how it intends to get to that goal," said Loren Thompson, a prominent analyst at the Lexington Institute who has close ties to Pentagon officials. "There's a lot of disagreement right now about whether the fleet we're buying has any relevance to the future."
By most accounts, today's fleet - the smallest in a century - is too small for comfort.
Navy officials say all critical missions around the globe are being met. But combatant commanders have also requested more ships than are available at times, particularly in the case of attack submarines.
Some lower-priority intelligence and surveillance missions have had to be ignored, commanders have reported, because of a lack of subs.
"There's always a higher demand for presence than we have in theater" or available in any given region, said Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources.
Many lawmakers who oversee Navy matters say they fear that even 313 ships will leave the future fleet strained to confront all the threats it might face in the global war on terrorism.
"I believe the number should be substantially higher," said Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. and a former Navy secretary who quit his Pentagon post in 1988 to protest a downsizing of the fleet.
But how big is big enough?
No one argues that the Navy needs to return to President Ronald Reagan's vision of a 600-ship fleet. Advances in technology have made today's ships far more capable than their predecessors of a generation ago.
In 1991, in thePersian Gulf War, the Navy had 526 ships. But only 35 were capable of firing Tomahawk cruise missiles, which hit Iraqi buildings with impressive accuracy, the National Journal reported. Today, the Navy has 74 such ships.
As technology improved and shipbuilding budgets declined, the fleet gradually dwindled and Navy estimates of requirements became more vague.
For several years, the Navy declined to specify a fleet size but spoke mostly of 260 to 375 ships.
Defining precise fleet requirements has been made more difficult since the end of the Cold War, experts say.
When the overriding mission was to deter a Soviet navy, regular peacetime deployments to the Mediterranean and the Pacific dictated a force of 15 aircraft carriers, said Norman Polmar, a noted naval historian and author.
Because each carrier required specific numbers of ships to escort it for protection, determining the size of the fleet became largely a matter of simple arithmetic.
But with the demise of the Soviet Union and a new focus on terrorism, fleet requirements have been tougher to define.
The Navy's 30-year shipbuilding plan - a 12-page document made up mostly of charts - offers little substantial discussion of the rationale for a 313-ship fleet.
It refers broadly to a maritime strategy of winning the nation's wars, deterring adversaries, limiting regional conflicts and fostering cooperative relationships with international partners, among other things.
It also says a 313-ship fleet "incurs risk" in such key areas as ballistic missile defense, intelligence and surveillance work, and strategic deterrence.
Any detailed threat analysis would be classified, but critics say the plan offers little insight into how the Navy should transform itself for the future.
"I don't see any real analysis of what the Navy needs," Polmar said.
"I just don't know the direction the Navy's going in. I don't understand it."
Perhaps the most dramatic challenge to Navy thinking and force planning came in 2005 from the Pentagon's former Office of Force Transformation.
That office, made up of defense reformers, foresaw the decline in shipbuilding money and urged a new focus on smaller, lower-cost ships to expand the fleet.
"This report calls into question the viability of the long-standing logic of naval force-building," it said in its opening line.
The report called for eight new ship designs, including a smaller aircraft carrier, to produce a much larger fleet of 558 to 846 ships.
In an age of terrorism, the report argued, a larger fleet of small, agile ships would prove more useful against multiple ever-changing enemies.
"The enemy could have difficulty determining what to expect and how to defeat them all," the report said.
That study, however, was largely ignored at the time. And the Navy has rejected smaller aircraft carriers, saying they would save little money while offering less combat power.
Nonetheless, the Navy has, in fact, focused on the need for small fast-attack vessels as a major addition to the future fleet.
At the heart of the 313-ship plan - and the reason that today's fleet would expand - is the addition of the littoral combat ship, a new small fast ship designed to fight in waters close to shore.
The plan calls for buying 55 littoral combat ships, making up more than a sixth of the future fleet.
But development of the new ship got off to a rocky start. Two competing designs by General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin were rushed into production, and costs about doubled for the first two models. The Navy then canceled the third and fourth ships to reform the program.
Lawmakers, meanwhile, are raising new questions about the trade-off between high-capability ships and a larger fleet.
Some House members, for example, are pushing to forgo buying an expensive destroyer next year, so they could restart production on an older-model destroyer that might be made more cheaply and yield more ships.
Analysts note that such issues remain unresolved, but they say the ultimate size of the fleet is unlikely to stray far from what the Navy has proposed.
"It's a balanced fleet that tries to hedge its bets in a lot of ways," said Robert Work of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "To me, it's a reasonable plan."