The USS Kidd (DDG-100)
Posted on 01/08/2011 6:16:12 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Navy savings may bolster DDG-51s
By Seth Koenig, Times Record Staff
Published: Friday, January 7, 2011 2:16 PM EST
BATH — U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on Thursday applauded a Navy decision to buy another Arleigh Burke class destroyer with money it saves in a streamlining effort.
Collins described the move as a positive step toward her ultimate goal of increasing the Navy’s procurement rate of destroyers to three per year.
Bath Iron Works is the lead shipyard in the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class, and will be in the running along with Mississippi-based competitor Ingalls shipyard to build the additional warship.
The announcement that the Defense Department will buy another DDG-51 came as part of a Pentagon news conference Thursday, during which Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the department has found $154 billion in efficiencies over the next five years. Gates said the military plans to reinvest $70 billion of that saved money in what a Pentagon release described as “more deserving accounts.”
“The fact that the Secretary of Defense is adding a destroyer to the budget at a time when the defense budget is being closely scrutinized, demonstrates the importance of building a Navy fleet that can support our national security objectives,” said Collins in a statement released Thursday evening. “Increasing the large surface combatant workload also means a guaranteed opportunity for Bath Iron Works to compete to build this ship, and I applaud the Navy for doing the tough work of finding wasteful spending and redirecting it toward higher priorities.”
Defense Department savings will be found in consolidating information technology centers, cutting new Army missile and launch systems, and eliminating or downgrading 200 senior executive positions, among several other proposed changes.
“It is important to not repeat the mistakes of the past by making drastic and ill-conceived cuts to the overall defense budget,” Gates reportedly stated Thursday. “At the same time, it is imperative for this department to eliminate wasteful, excessive and unneeded spending.”
Among the areas to get more investment over the next five years as a result of the savings is the shipbuilding budget, where Gates proposed adding an Arleigh Burke.
According to a November letter sent from Collins to the White House Office of Management and Budget, both BIW and Ingalls officials have argued the Navy’s current rate of destroyer procurement isn’t enough to support the two shipyards. As a result, the Maine Republican called for overhead savings to be redirected to the DDG-51 program, and increase upon the Navy’s current plan to buy 1.5 Arleigh Burkes per year.
“I will continue to work with my colleagues in Congress, Secretary Gates, and the Navy’s leadership to reach a construction rate of three ships per year,” said Collins, a member of both the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Appropriations Committee, in a statement Thursday.
Collins noted that an independent bipartisan panel assigned to study the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review recommended the Navy increase its fleet size to 346 ships, 64 more than it currently has.
“Yet, the current rate of procurement is not sufficient even to meet the 313-ship goal, which the Chief of Naval Operations has repeatedly described as a minimum, much less the 346 ships that the independent commission testified is actually needed to meet maritime presence requirements,” Collins wrote in her November letter.
The streamlining measures announced Thursday will be included in the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2012 budget request, according to a Pentagon release Thursday.
skoenig@timesrecord.com
The USS Kidd (DDG-100)
Three a year? China will bury us under with mass alone..they may have inferior stuff but if they makes a dozen to our three...
The Chinese are building lots and lots of subs.
They’ve already demonstrated that they can surface right in the middle of our fleets having been undetected until the last moment.
RINO. Not a word about whether we need the bally thing, just log-rolling for her home-town shipyard. As a retired Navy officer, I am not sure of its place in the order of battle.
/johnny
From the BIW website:
Shipbuilding has been a way of life along the Kennebec River in Bath, Maine, since 1762, when the sailing ship Earl of Bute was launched on the site of present day Bath. The Bath Iron Works (BIW) shipyard, located on the west bank of the Kennebec, just south of downtown Bath, is the namesake of an iron foundry established in 1826
Yeah it is pork, but the Bath Iron Works are an important shipyard and Maine as well as the country would be lesser without it.
Bath Iron works knows what they are doing when it comes to building frigates and destroyers.
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