A senior House Republican warned Tuesday that while the top military brass increasingly wants to bulk up the United States Navy following years of budget cuts, an imminent budget fight between Congress and the White House could undermine that effort.
Rep. Randy Forbes, R.-Va.. said there has been a “rebalance of intellectual analysis” at the Pentagon in favor of boosting the Navy, even though Defense Secretary Ash Carter warned in a December memo against building too many ships at the expense of other priorities, aircrafts and other weaponry. He allowed that Carter and others on President Obama’s team might try to shortchange the Navy in the upcoming appropriations process, but suggested there would be bipartisan congressional opposition to such a move, and stressed support for more ships within the Navy.
“The thing that I’m most excited about is this new kind of understanding that we need to rebuild and increase the Navy,” Forbes told reporters during a defense policy discussion on Tuesday.
The Virginia Republican suggested that Carter’s memo was a political document more than anything else. “That’s one of those memos that was designed to be leaked,” he said. “We definitely need more ships … We’re not on ‘Star Trek.’ We don’t get to beam them one place or the other, you have to sail them there. So you’ve got to have ships, you’ve got to have presence and you’ve got to have surge capacity.”
But Forbes also recognized a need for more of the airplanes and other spending priorities Carter raised, which led into another critique of the White House. “What really concerns me is the continued discussion of national defense as if it’s something where we can simply say, ‘This is how much we want to spend, now let’s spend that and make our strategies compliant with our budget,'” he said. “Should we not be changing that analysis and saying, ‘OK, what do we need to defend the country?’ … My worry is that analysis is not being done at the White House. I think it is being done at the Pentagon.”
Forbes added that even military strategies promulgated by the Obama administration under current budgets require a funding increase to hit the goal of floating 308 ships. Without an increase, as the Congressional Budget Office has told Congress, the U.S. Navy would be limited to just 237 ships. “That should be a major neon sign going off to us,” he said.
