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Leaders struggle to sell shipbuilding plans

Five times this winter, Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, had the opportunity to tell Congress why the Navy wants another $3 billion DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer.

Five times, congressional supporters grooved their questions to the CNO.

Five times, the CNO had little to say.

“Would you explain where the DDG 1000 fits into the future of the surface Navy, and do you believe that this is the right ship?” asked Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, on March 5.

“What the DDG 1000 brings to our Navy,” Roughead replied, “is an introduction of new technologies that will be very important to how we go forward.”

He didn’t discuss how the ship fit into the Navy’s maritime strategy nor why today’s fleet or tomorrow’s naval battles demand its special capabilities.

Instead, he touched briefly on its 10 major advances, emphasizing that the most important is its small crew.

“That is absolutely a critical step forward for us in the DDG 1000.”

Such limp performances didn’t matter in the Senate, which voted to fund another DDG 1000 in the spring. But it failed to sway House lawmakers, who chose not to include a ship in their funding bill. Analysts now predict that the Zumwalts, at $3 billion per ship — $5 billion by some estimates — will be a two-ship class.

Even to lawmakers eager to fulfill its wishes, Navy leaders can’t seem to express a clear vision for what ships they need and why they need them.

Instead, powerful forces in the House advocate building cheaper but smaller DDG 51-class destroyers until the day when, they say, the Navy decides exactly what kind of new ship it really wants.

Similar travails plague CG(X), the planned next cruiser; plans for more nuclear-powered vessels; and the question of how many aircraft carriers the Navy needs.

Fed up with what they view as incomplete or uninspired answers, increasingly impatient lawmakers are trying to make up the Navy’s mind themselves.

The combination poses serious risks to a Navy that has been reeling in recent years from budget and personnel cuts, increasing demands to contribute to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and questions about the relevance of blue-water warships in those wars and the broader war against terrorism.

DDG 1000 destroyer

Under development for more than a decade, the Navy never has articulated a simple and forceful argument explaining the need for the Zumwalt-class ships. Many officers remain confused about the destroyer’s abilities and intended use.

“I certainly haven’t seen a vigorous defense mounted,” one retired officer said. “The position papers are out there to support the ship, but nobody’s standing up for it.”

Former CNO Adm. Vern Clark — a surface warfare officer who was largely responsible for creating the Littoral Combat Ship program — generally described DDG 1000 as a technology driver for the fleet and a bridge to the CG(X) cruiser. Both of his successors — Adm. Mike Mullen and Roughead, who, like Clark, were surface officers — similarly offered only lukewarm support.

“Roughead is killing the ship by not advocating its specific capabilities,” the veteran officer declared.

Navy officials declined to be interviewed for this article.

The DDG 1000 program manager, a captain, is trying to stir up support with a little-used, capabilities-based presentation dating from mid-2005. But he’s getting little active support from the admirals — a fact noted on the Hill.

“That effort should be coming from the requirements flag officers,” one senior congressional staffer said.

Some Navy officials say national security concerns have made them reluctant to reveal details about the heavily classified ships. But observers dismissed that claim.

“You’ve got to be able to make the argument in terms you can put out in public,” said retired Capt. Jan van Tol, a naval analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former destroyer commander. “You may have all the good reasons in the world for having the ship, but if people don’t know them, don’t be surprised if you don’t get funding.”

The Navy’s insistence on calling these huge, expensive vessels “destroyers” also rankles critics, including likely Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

The former naval aviator has noted that the Zumwalts, intended to fight in coastal waters and pound ground targets with 155mm guns, have different roles from existing destroyers — and certainly have un-destroyer-like price tags.

“I’ve never heard of a $3 billion destroyer,” McCain has said on several occasions.

The current plan to build seven ships also works against the service, which originally wanted 32 new destroyers.

“Seven of anything is nothing, not after you wanted 32,” said House Armed Services seapower subcommittee chairman Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., following a hearing in March. “Seven tells me they don’t want it.”

More Burkes

Taylor’s district includes the sprawling Northrop Grumman Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., which builds Navy destroyers and amphibious ships. He opposes further Zumwalt construction in favor of building more DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

The Burkes are cheaper — $1.2 billion vs. $3 billion or more — and remain the world’s most advanced warships, with the exception of the DDG 1000s. Taylor and others argue that new Burkes could replace some of the early Flight I and II models, which can’t support helicopter operations, and could be outfitted with open-architecture combat systems, extensive fiber-optic cabling and designed to be operated by smaller crews.

The Navy says no. Officials say the price tag for new Burkes could reach $2 billion apiece because the production line has begun to close down. And at such prices, the Zumwalts would be better fighting value.

But this is where the Navy’s historic inability to project costs accurately comes back to haunt it. Half of every new ship class begun since the 1980s cost more than double their original unit cost. That’s why analysts predict the Zumwalts eventually will cost closer to $5 billion, largely because they contain so much new technology that the risks and unknowns are higher. By contrast, the cost of building Burke destroyers is well understood.

The Navy may be ready to yield on this debate. In March, service acquisition chief John Thackrah revealed the Navy is developing contingency plans to build more 51s.

“What you’re seeing,” one service official said, “is the CNO, together with the secretary, taking control of the Navy program and making it viable.”

Nuclear-powered warships

Navy testimony last year opened the door for nuclear-powered cruisers if oil prices surged above $70 a barrel. Oil recently touched $135 per barrel and is expected to rise further.

Nuclear power provides virtually unlimited range and enough energy to fuel powerful radars and directed-energy weapons.

But it is lawmakers, not Navy leaders, who are driving the issues.

Taylor and former subcommittee chairman Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., last year pushed through a provision to make all new major combat ships nuclear-powered unless the Navy asserts such a propulsion system is not in the national interest.

But so far, the Navy has offered little resistance. Despite solid arguments for sticking with gas turbines — principally the high cost of building, maintaining and manning nuclear vessels — the Navy has remained, in the words of one congressional source, “curiously passive.”

Now, in the absence of a clear position, Congress is poised to decide the issue.

Taylor, who has wondered aloud whether the Navy is taking the nuclear power requirement seriously, has his provision in place to force the Navy’s hand. And if the first CG(X) cruiser is to be built beginning in 2011, long-lead procurement of nuclear components would need to be funded in 2009.

That’s the budget now under consideration.

The CG(X) cruiser

Taylor and his nuclear power allies already are worried the Navy is trying to manipulate that decision. They worry that the Navy’s inability to complete and release the analysis of alternatives for the new cruiser is a ploy to postpone a decision on nuclear power and avoid buying reactors in 2009.

The study, in which the Navy urges a panel of architects and engineers to choose the tumblehome hull form of the DDG 1000 for the cruiser, was to have been completed late last fall. But in November — only weeks after taking office — Roughead sent it back with more questions. Draft versions are said to be circulating, but officially, the service is not forecasting a date for completing or releasing the study.

Unease also persists in naval architecture circles about the stability of the Zumwalt’s tumblehome hull, which is limited in the amount of growth it can absorb.

Unfunded priorities

One of the more blatant contradictions in the Navy’s public statements is the question of a 10th LPD 17 amphibious transport dock.

Only nine LPDs are in the fleet plan, and the ninth was authorized for construction last year. The Marines adamantly want 11; another LPD was the No. 1 item on the Corps’ past two annual unfunded programs list, a wish list provided each year at Congress’s request.

The Navy listed the ship first on its 2007 unfunded list and gave it a No. 2 priority in 2008 — yet service leaders rebuffed House efforts last year to buy it, saying they’d rather put the money elsewhere. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., House Appropriations defense subcommittee chairman, has declared his strong intention to pay for the ship this year; the House, ignoring renewed Navy protests, added the ship to the 2009 budget.

Credibility

The Navy’s No. 1 unfunded priority is “critical maritime patrol improvements” for aging P-3 patrol planes, prompting skeptics to ask: If the repairs are so critical, why weren’t they funded in the first place?

This is the kind of question that Navy analysts ask repeatedly over a range of issues affecting fleet readiness.

Fleet sailors remain concerned over the viability of plans to staff the littoral combat ships with rotating crews.

The Marine Corps questions whether the Navy really supports the ambitious and expensive Sea Base concept.

The public, too, doubts the Navy’s word on issues like the controversy over a proposed Outlying Field practice airstrip in North Carolina, the effects of sonars on marine mammals, and health issues and unexploded ammunition on the former bombing range on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.

And Congress — this year, at least — forcefully turned back the Navy’s request to allow a temporary reduction to 10 aircraft carriers in the next decade, when the carrier Enterprise is retired before its replacement is ready.

Although many analysts say they feel the Navy’s request is logical, Taylor in March declared the idea “dead on arrival.” Every Navy plan to temporarily reduce fleet size in the past 15 years has resulted in permanent decreases. Taylor isn’t buying that argument again.

Jerry Cann, the Navy acquisition chief in the 1990s, said the problems run to all levels of Navy leadership, not just the admirals.

“You can’t separate the blue-suit Navy from the civilians. If you have strong civilian executives, you can help drive these things in the right direction,” Cann said.

The issue isn’t that Navy leaders set out to deliberately deceive the public or the Congress. Rather, it is that with good intentions, they have failed to anticipate the results of their actions.

“People weren’t doing this out of malice and deception,” van Tol said. “I cannot conceive of senior naval officers consciously acting deceptively. Certainly, they can put spin on things or interpret things in a favorable light, but deliberate deception goes against the naval ethos. The vast majority of people behave honorably.”

But being honorable has nothing to do with being honest with oneself, he said. The trouble is, leaders have insisted all along they could manage their way out of the impending trouble.

“The Navy needs to level with itself,” he said. “They’ve got problems. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to deal with it.”