THE RISING SEA DRAGIN IN ASIA
Posted on 02/01/2007 10:31:14 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Bedeviled with cost overruns, the Navy's shipbuilding program is in danger of sinking under its own weight.
Navy leaders have struggled to upgrade an aging fleet of warships with next-generation aircraft carriers, destroyers, amphibious assault ships and submarines that cost billions more than the vessels they replace.
Seven new ships are budgeted for this year, barely a third of the number built annually during the peak Reagan-era defense buildup. Fifteen will be decommissioned, including the San Diego-based Ogden, Trenton and Dolphin.
The result is a fleet of 276, the lowest total in nine decades.
“The number of ships we're producing is absolutely pathetic,” said Winslow Wheeler, an analyst for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Defense Information and a frequent critic of Pentagon priorities. “It's a system out of control.”
Navy leaders and military analysts have warned that if Congress doesn't boost the Pentagon's shipbuilding budget – $11.6 billion this fiscal year – the Navy won't be able to meet its growing list of commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Latin America and the western Pacific.
They raised some of those concerns at West 2007, a large military conference that began yesterday at the San Diego Convention Center.
The Navy's fleet is now less than one-fourth the size of the armada assembled for the battle of Okinawa in World War II, said retired Vice Adm. John Nyquist of Coronado, who directed the Navy's surface warfare construction program in the 1980s.
“We certainly want to have enough ships to protect our country,” Nyquist said.
To help pay for shipbuilding, the Navy has cut thousands of sailor billets from its rolls since 2003. It also has trimmed orders for new ships and stretched them out over more years.
Meanwhile, the nation's six shipyards – including General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego – fear they'll have to lay off more workers if the Navy's pace of new projects doesn't speed up. The lack of steady work also prompts highly trained employees who design and construct warships to find other careers.
“That's a skill that, once it's lost, it'll be very, very difficult to get back,” said Fred Harris, president of General Dynamics NASSCO.
The problem isn't easy to fix. The parties most heavily involved in shipbuilding – Congress, the Navy and shipbuilders – all have incentives to add expensive, high-tech gadgets that pump up the capabilities and prices of new vessels.
Pentagon officials and shipbuilders trade jabs at conferences such as West 2007. The Navy blames shipbuilders for busting budgets, while shipbuilders point a finger at the Navy for frequent design changes and a lack of steady work that forces them to boost costs.
The Navy has tried to make changes. For example, it conceived the shallow-water, no-frills Littoral Combat Ship as the future backbone of its fleet. But that program, too, has recently run into financial trouble.
The Congressional Research Service has proposed shifting some Navy ships from nuclear to conventional propulsion, reducing each vessel's hull survivability from military to civilian commercial standards, and using the same hull design for different ship models.
In 1997, Navy officials had drawn a bright, red line at 300 ships for its fleet, a number below which then-Chief of Naval Operations Jay Johnson said would imperil the country's safety. That was the latest in a series of red lines drawn since 1988, when then-Navy Secretary Jim Webb resigned over the Reagan administration's wavering commitment to a 600-ship Navy. (Webb is now a Democratic senator from Virginia, elected in November.)
Last year, Adm. Michael Mullen, the current chief of naval operations, set a new goal of 313 ships by 2020. The goal will require an annual budget of $14 billion to $20 billion, said Norman Polmar, a well-known naval analyst in Washington, D.C.
Mullen also has prodded the Navy to quit emphasizing ship numbers. Such an approach, he said, made sense in the tit-for-tat competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War but doesn't mean much now that threats come from failed states or murky terrorist groups worldwide.
He urges defense experts to gauge the Navy's fleet by its collective strength, because modern communications allow battle groups and fleets to link up in a seamless network.
At the same time, Mullen has promoted a concept he calls the “1,000-ship Navy,” drawing on alliances with foreign navies and coast guards.
“It's really about a global navy network,” said Vice Adm. John G. Morgan Jr., the Navy's chief of plans, information and strategy, during a West 2007 panel on shipbuilding yesterday. “When you realize you can't do it all, you've got to look at other ways.”
San Diego has a big stake in the shipbuilding game.
A smaller, busier Navy fleet takes dollars out of the local economy while keeping sailors away from home more. General Dynamics NASSCO – currently building nine supply ships for the Navy but with no additional military contracts in sight – employs 6,600 local workers. It is the city's largest manufacturing plant.
“We are essentially the last major shipbuilder on the West Coast,” Harris said. “We'll work to keep this shipyard healthy, and this industry in San Diego.”
As the Iraq war nears its fourth anniversary, the Navy must compete for funds with the Army and Marine Corps, who get top priority because their personnel and equipment have been stretched thin.
The Navy is as busy as ever, its carriers launching air strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq, its destroyers chasing pirates off the Horn of Africa, its frigates halting suspected drug runners in Latin American waters, its amphibious assault ships ferrying Marines and Special Forces to the Middle East and elsewhere.
“You don't see it or hear about it, because the focus is on boots on the ground – and rightly so,” said Cynthia Brown, president of the American Shipbuilding Association, the industry's lobby group. “(But) any time you talk about a global war, you can't be there, you can't get there without ships.”
Sky-high shipbuilding costs are by no means new.
A 2006 study by the RAND Corp., a Santa Monica-based defense consultant, showed shipbuilding costs over a 40-year period had risen 7 percent to 11 percent a year, far outpacing the rate of inflation.
But cost overruns are sucking up more dollars than ever, even as shipbuilding budgets have stayed steady or shrunk. The Navy is replacing an unusual number of ship classes with modern upgrades: attack submarines, aircraft carriers, amphibious assault ships, destroyers, and the Lewis-and-Clark-class supply ships made by NASSCO.
The Navy's biggest cost headache is the still-unbuilt DDG-1000 destroyer. The ship was conceived a decade ago as a $750 million replacement for the Spruance and, eventually, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that now form the backbone of the surface fleet.
Technologically, the sleek DDG-1000 is loaded: It will boast advanced radar, vertical-launch cells for Tomahawk and Sea Sparrow missiles, 155-mm guns with long-range, precision-guided projectiles and a super-efficient electrical generation system – all packed into a stealthy hull inspired by the Air Force's B-2 bomber.
But with a cost that has swelled to $3.6 billion, the ship keeps accountants awake nights. The Navy has cut its planned purchase of the ship from 30 to seven. Some defense analysts predict the Pentagon ultimately will buy only two or three.
“Cramming that much capability onto one ship is ludicrous,” said Bob Work, a defense analyst for the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C. “Everybody outside the Navy looked at it and said, 'You're crazy.' ”
As an alternative to souped-up ships such as the DDG-1000, the Navy in the late 1990s hatched the bare-bones Littoral Combat Ship.
Small enough to operate in the near-shore seas and estuaries that Navy officials call “brown water,” the littoral hull was designed without weapons systems. Instead, warfighting modules for functions such as antisubmarine or countermine warfare could be designed separately and loaded onto the ships as needed.
The no-frills design would allow the mass production of at least 55 littoral ships, at a cost of no more than $220 million apiece. It is the key to Mullen's 313-ship blueprint.
The first four littoral ships, all under construction, were bound for San Diego. Then last month, Navy auditors discovered that costs had nearly doubled on the third ship, which Lockheed Martin is building. The Navy ordered the contract suspended for 90 days while it investigates.
Despite the program's troubles, even some critics of the Pentagon think the strategy of introducing more streamlined and smaller ships will offer the Navy its best chance of forming a sufficient fleet in an era of crushing technology costs.
“What you really want to do is mass-produce,” said Chris Hellman, a military analyst with the Washington D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “We're already operating the best Navy in the world. Our edge is so vast, we don't really need a huge technological upgrade.”
I do not mean to propose that we keep ships in service for 50-60 years, as some navies do, but warships like the Spruance-class destroyers and the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood still had many years of use left in them when they were retired from service.
If the Navy did not have any use for the Belleau Wood as an amphibious assault ship in its current fleet alignment, the ship was more than capable of fulfilling its secondary role as a sea-control carrier. Equipped with Harrier jump-jets (and F-35 Lightnings once they enter service) and helicopters, the ship would have been an equal to the carriers of virtually every other navy on Earth.
We are surrounded by an impervious virtual labyrinth of lawyers who can negotiation any deal with our enemies, "land for peace," "army of one," "navy of (somewhere between 1 and 276, unless you're Great Britain, in which case the number of ships will be 21)".
There is nothing sacred in our country, that cannot be sold to, given to, or forced upon our enemies, by our lawyers cleverly suing for peace --- not sending our fleet to the bottom, but to be mothballed.
The Pentagon Condominium and Office Complex can then be developed by what's-their-name ... oh yeah, the foreign powers buying up the yellow stripe down the middle of Texas.
It's all so exciting; there is so much to sell off, of what was America; there is so much money to be made; there is so much real estate to be purchased here, by our former enemies who are now the industrialized newcomers, destined to buy up what they once desired to blow up.
The Red Chinese know full well, that they have succeeded at taking the lead on controlling the worldwide price of labor, and, that they can maintain that militarily if they so choose ... and they probably will, a little, here and there.
Despite the horrendous status of people who live under the grip of the Mao police state in Red China, "corporate America" still cannot crawl low enough to find more profit margins there.
If only a few companies did that, they would be raked over the coals by the liberal media (Kathy Lee and Frank Gifford, for example).
But when the multitudes of limousine liberals' investment portfolios at Goldman-Sachs are involved, they who actually OWN the liberal media and have profited enormously from the relative slave labor under communist control ... you can barely find a peep on page 36.
Some "war." Some "defense business."
Your first clue, was immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, when the President vacuum-ously abandoned our industrial base which then and now, has languished in the face of the enemy buildup.
Our fearless leaders who promised, "Help is on the way ..." have not delivered, except by way of handing over our industrial base to foreign businesses/powers.
Just swell.
When Iran skips over all the obvious targets in the middle East, and instead goes after Dover AFB --- in other words, hits us in our logistics chain --- well that is going to be the surprise to remember.
Administration decisions assume that is not going to happen.
Oh, THAT'S a good idea...
That drew me in too. Of all the cost saving measures that could be imagined, that's surely the most insane.
Man, what we could do if a decent portion of our GDP was devoted to defense. This 'faster, cheaper, better' stuff is running thin.
All anyone has to do is look at Jeff-Head's PLAN pages and links to know that we are going to be in very deep Kim-chii if we don't get our heads out of our collective butts and start tending to the fleet.
The Chi-coms are serious. They are building new hulls, they are studying carrier ops, they are spending money and getting results.
Just out source our ship building to china? Look at the money we would save.
We used to devote 50% of the Federal budget to defense and 3% of GDP. Those days are likely gone forever due, in large part, to the end of the Cold War and out-of-control entitlement spending. Unfortunately, the Defense establishment has shot itself in the foot by continually downsizing and closing bases in the name of cost savings. As a result, it has almost no constituency left. But that's what the liberals had in mind all along.
DDG-1000 is intended for Land Attack. It provides advanced fire support to support amphibious landings by the Marines. But, as an "alternative" you could have a nifty PT Boat.
Both are useful. I have nothing against the LCS. But, it's not really an "alternative" in any military sense. Talking about it as an "alternative" in terms of cost is meaningless. Some stuff costs more than other stuff. So what?
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