Russia and China could use their growing naval power to shut down international shipping lanes within 10 years, a Senate Democrat warned Monday.
“No one in Congress should sleep on the future of the open seas,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told reporters on a conference call Monday. “If you look at what the Russians are doing in the Arctic and you look at what the Chinese are doing in the South China Seas, we have reason to believe that commercial shipping could be interrupted in a major way within the next decade.”
No one in Washington disagrees about the importance of U.S. submarines, but the maintenance of the fleet presents an increasingly thorny problem for the Pentagon given the recent years of military budget-cutting. Naval officials are scheduled to begin replacing the fleet’s Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, but at a cost that would crowd out other spending.
With the White House and Congress in a chronic state of disagreement over military funding, national security hawks are looking for cost-saving measures and budgetary shortcuts to pay for the submarines.
Murphy, who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee and represents a state that builds much of the submarine fleet, wants the Navy to build the Ohio-class vessels without cutting other submarine production. That would require reversing a current plan to cut back on the construction of stealthy, nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines.
“The Navy has good reason to propose a temporary pullback because of the massive scale of the Ohio-replacement class, but we’ve got to find a way to do both,” said Murphy, who spent the weekend touring the Arctic aboard the U.S.S. Hartford, Lincoln-class submarine that is eventually supposed to be replaced by the Virginia-class subs. “If you look at the pace of Russian and Chinese building programs, we can’t afford to drop Virginia-class production back to one for more than a year.”
Naval and congressional officials are looking for an alternative “Strategic Deterrence Fund” to pay for the Ohio-class construction, but the needs of other services loom over the debate. “I am not fully familiar with the strategic deterrence fund that you all have referenced here, but if that is a strategic deterrence fund which would help or benefit one leg of the triad, I would ask for consideration that all legs of the triad be considered in such an approach,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told a House panel last week.
