Defense Secretary Ash Carter wants to cut advanced, shore-hugging ships in favor of fighter jets and submarines. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus wants to grow the surface fleet.
Lawmakers, it turns out, will probably side with Mabus.
“To put more money in submarines, Navy fighter jets and a lot of other important areas, one trade-off we made was to buy only as many littoral combat ships as we really need,” Carter said last week at the Economic Club in Washington, where he previewed the Pentagon’s budget request.
But some members of the Senate Armed Services Committee seem inclined to give the Navy the higher ship numbers it wants.
“I have supported the Navy and I will support the Navy,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., told the Washington Examiner. “I’ve talked to Secretary Mabus about this. He is working and he has been very diligent about building our fleets where we need to have them because they’ve been diminished so much … I think it’d be a shame to slow that down now.”
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., also said he would support including the Navy’s requested number of ships in the final budget.
“The U.S. Navy has repeatedly said that they require more ships to do the job that the American people expect of the finest maritime force in the history of the world,” said Shelby, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee. “Let me be clear: I will fight tooth and nail against the misguided attempt to needlessly undermine the security of our nation and the American people.”
Littoral combat ships are smaller than the service’s mainline cruisers and destroyers. They don’t pack as much firepower, but are outfitted with interchangeable “mission modules” for anti-submarine, anti-surface and mine-hunting operations. And as their name suggests, they are built for high-speed, near-shore operations, as opposed to the classic “blue-water” missions of larger warships.
Two types are being built: a monohull frame designed by Lockheed Martin at Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, and an aluminum trimaran being built by Austal USA in Mobile, Ala. Hence Shelby’s interest.
In a memo to Mabus late last year, Carter said the Navy should reduce how many littoral combat ships it buys over the next five years from 52 to 40. Carter said last week that the Pentagon’s five-year plan would purchase two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers per year for a total of 10. The Pentagon will also look to increase its five-year purchase of Lockheed Martin F-35 joint strike fighters by 13, and add 16 Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets. The budget also forecasts the purchase of nine Virginia-class attack submarines over those five years.
Ben Friedman, a defense analyst with the Cato Institute, said he would expect lawmakers to side with the Navy’s desire for more littoral combat ships, since more ships being built means more jobs in home districts.
“One would expect certainly the Armed Services Committees and appropriators perhaps to side more with services because they tend to like numbers in force structure more than capabilities,” he said.
The littoral combat ship program is not without critics and has faced its fair share of delays and problems, including a breakdown on the littoral combat ship Milwaukee late last year that forced the ship to be towed to port just 20 days after its commissioning. A vocal critic of the ships, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., welcomed reports late last year that the Pentagon had asked the Navy to reduce the number of ships it buys.
“My concerns with the LCS, from cost overruns to schedule delays to poor performance, are well-known,” the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said in a December statement. “I hope these reports are an indication that the Pentagon is thinking strategically about the size and composition of the future force, including the LCS program.”
It seems any who thought a defense budget top-line predetermined by last year’s budget deal would lead to a conflict-free budget process for fiscal 2017 were wrong. Before the administration has even released full details of its request, lawmakers began lodging their complaints, especially over the president’s war-fund request, which many Republicans feel is too low.
The administration is asking for $582.7 billion in fiscal 2017 to keep the military running, including about $59 billion in a war fund, numbers in line with last year’s budget deal.
But lawmakers expected the $59 billion war chest to be a floor, not a ceiling. The administration’s budget plan includes a 50 percent increase in spending on the war against the Islamic State, maintaining a higher troop presence in Afghanistan longer and quadrupling the amount spent to position equipment and rotate troops through Europe to better reassure NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression.
Lawmakers, including Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, say these increased costs of operations will force other programs to be cut unless the administration asks for more money in its overseas contingency operations fund.
A House Armed Services Committee staffer said it was impossible to predict how much the war chest would need to be increased to without seeing the full budget request and what base requirements were being cut.
But Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, said she expected Republicans to try to add $15 billion-$20 billion to the overseas contingency operations fund. This is the same budget gimmick that led President Obama to veto it.
“It is possible, if not likely, this will launch a political fight similar to what we saw last year over defense. It is also possible both the defense authorization and appropriations bills get tied up in this disagreement and delayed as a result,” Eaglen said.
