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McCullough: Fleet not able to go everywhere

Today’s Navy is entering its most fiscally and operationally challenging era in decades, the service’s top requirements officer said Wednesday, as a consistently high demand from combatant commanders means the service doesn’t have enough ships to go all the places it wants.

There’s a “presence deficit” for U.S. naval forces across the globe, said Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources. What’s more, the worldwide economic crisis and concurrent uncertainty about funding from Congress means the Navy will have a tricky time estimating the money it needs and the money it will get to pay for what McCullough called “the triangle of death” — people, operations and procurement.

“I’ve got a lot of people sitting on the fourth deck and the fifth deck in my wedge of the Pentagon, and they’re spinning like tops” working to account for all the factors, he said.

Even more uncertainty comes from anticipating the priorities of the incoming Obama administration and fluctuating fuel costs, McCullough said.

“Last July, I crawled under my desk when I looked at the cost of a … barrel of oil,” he said. Yesterday the price was about $41 a barrel, “so now I’m dancing on my desk. But I have no idea what it’s going to be next week.”

McCullough made his remarks in a presentation before the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium outside Washington. He said that despite the Navy’s challenges and the coming fiscal uncertainty, the service should continue to maintain what he called its “high-end” ships and capabilities, even as a new generation of “low-end” ships, including the littoral combat ship and the Joint High Speed Vessel, are entering the portfolio.

The LCS and JHSV will be appealing for working with the navies of developing nations, but if the Navy loses its high-end capabilities, it’ll never get them back, McCullough said. The costs to build a new carrier or Aegis cruiser are prohibitively higher than maintaining existing ones.

“You’ve got to be able to maintain the high end capability because if you lose it, the cost to recoup it is incredible, not only in dollars, but in other things. So you have to be able to maintain the industrial base, and a capability at the high end, if you choose to be a high-end Navy.”