Navy News, news from Iraq - Navy Times

Webb: Mayport CVN would worsen cash situation

Citing a $28 billion backlog in Navy shore maintenance and increasing readiness “risk” at Navy installations, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb on Thursday repeated his call for the Navy to scrap plans to relocate an aircraft carrier to Naval Station Mayport, Fla.

Webb, a Democrat, wrote in a letter to Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn that he thought recent congressional testimony by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead had strengthened the case against a Mayport carrier. On June 4, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roughead detailed funding shortfalls and other problems at Navy bases.

“I was struck by the growing level of risk that Roughead identifies in several Navy war-fighting and shore readiness areas,” Webb wrote, detailing Roughead’s comments about the Navy being “stretched,” its risk “trending toward significant” and the growing strike fighter “gap.”

“I do not recall a starker assessment of the operational risks facing the Navy since then-CNO Adm. Thomas Hayward testified in 1979 that the Navy possessed a one-and-a-half ocean Navy for a three-ocean requirement,” Webb wrote. With all those financial and other problems confronting the service, it shouldn’t spend the money on relocating a carrier to Florida, he said.

Even though the Navy decided to base a flattop to Mayport — in the interest of “strategic dispersal,” to keep the East Coast carriers from being bottled up in a single port — the Pentagon will re-examine that idea as part of this year’s Quadrennial Defense Review.

Florida lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Mel Martinez and Democrat Bill Nelson, have defended the Navy’s decision, pointing to what they say are the dangers of a Pearl Harbor-style attack on Hampton Roads, VA., if all the Navy’s carriers are caught in port together.

“I expect the Quadrennial Defense Review will reinforce this Navy requirement to strategically disperse our East Coast capital ships,” Martinez said Thursday through a spokeswoman.

Webb’s letter was the latest strike in an ongoing war between the Virginia and Florida decisions over the Mayport carrier move, which could draw millions of dollars and thousands of jobs away from Hampton Roads and move it to Florida.