Defense Secretary Ash Carter has asked the Navy to buy fewer ships to invest more heavily in electronic warfare and combat aircraft, according to reports.
In a memo to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, Carter wrote that the Navy is on its way to reach its target fleet size of 308 ships, a number that should be met “but not irresponsibly exceeded,” Bloomberg reported.
“For the last several years, the Department of the Navy has overemphasized resources used to incrementally increase total ship numbers at the expense of critically needed investments in areas where our adversaries are not standing still, such as strike, ship survivability, electronic warfare and other capabilities,” Carter wrote in the memo.
The number of ships in the Navy’s fleet, rather than the number of Army brigades or tanks, is often the statistic presidential candidates point to in the political arena when talking about plans to rebuild the military and national defense.
Sen. Marco Rubio’s defense plan has the Navy increase to a “minimum” of 323 ships by 2024. Another GOP presidential contender, Carly Fiorina, wants between 300 and 350 ships.
Carter specifically asked the service to buy 12 fewer littoral combat ships between fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2021. The ship comes in two variants, one made by Lockheed Martin and another by Austal USA. The money instead would go toward buying 31 more carrier-variant F-35C joint strike fighters from Lockheed Martin over the same time period. The defense secretary also asked the Navy to buy more Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets.
He also called on the Navy to reverse planned cuts to its surveillance aircraft program, which include the Northrop Grumman E-2D Advanced Hawkeye and MQ-4C Triton drones, the article said. The Northrop-made drone is a variant of the Global Hawk.
The Navy would also buy more SM-6 missiles built by Raytheon and a new lightweight torpedo.
