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House panel: Navy could seek fleet funding help

The Navy will never afford the fleet it wants, its new European ballistic missile defense mission and a new class of ballistic-missile subs, defense experts told a House panel Wednesday — but it could try to get other parts of the government to pay for them.

Two congressional shipbuilding experts and a high-profile defense analyst told the seapower subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee that a good strategy for the Navy might be to arrange for some of its big-ticket items to be funded elsewhere in the labyrinthine federal budget, rather than from the same pool of money the service gets each year to build ships.

The cost of designing and building a replacement for the Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine could vacuum up so much of the Navy’s regular shipbuilding budget — as much as half, according to one forecast — it could barely afford anything else by the middle of the century, observers worry.

In answering lawmakers’ questions, defense analyst Loren Thompson gave the example of how the U.S. buys nuclear weapons, which are funded by the Department of Energy, even though they’re actually fielded aboard Air Force bombers or Air Force and Navy missiles. The Navy could make a similar case that it needs separate, strategic funding for the estimated $85 billion it will cost to replace Ohio-class boomers, Thompson said, which would leave its main yearly shipbuilding account free to build the rest of the fleet.

“If [the submarine known as SSBN(X)] were funded as a separate priority, we’d probably get a better outcome,” he said. “If we were to do that, while leaving the planned shipbuilding budget at its current level, it would probably solve most of our forward shipbuilding problems.”

The Navy’s situation might not be as rosy as all that — analysts and lawmakers have said that the Navy could need as much as $27 billion per year to reach its goal of at least 313 ships. The service is expected to submit a request for about $15 billion this year.

The seapower subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., told reporters after the hearing that he would be fine with a separate funding scheme for SSBN(X), even though it could take control and funding away from him, and possibly, the full House Armed Services Committee. Taylor said he felt the same about different funding for the Navy’s portion of ballistic missile defense, for which it now shares funding and oversight with the Missile Defense Agency.

Shipbuilding expert Ron O’Rourke, of the Congressional Research Service, told Taylor’s subcommittee that BMD was a good example of the wonkish three-card-monte that could work for SSBN(X). O’Rourke cautioned that as a CRS analyst, he could not actually make recommendations on policy, but he was asked for his thoughts on the concept of splitting up the Navy’s cash flow.

“You could argue BMD is such a precedent — that’s not a service, that’s a mission area, yet it has its own budget category,” O’Rourke said. “If BMD has been separated out as a mission area, that’s a precedent for creating strategic mission deterrence as its own budget category, so the service wouldn’t have to take budget items out of its own hide.”

The day’s third witness, Eric Labs of the Congressional Budget Office, presented an analysis that showed why the Navy might want to also ask for help with the BMD mission: Depending on the arrangements for patrol sectors in Europe and the Middle East, the fleet could need as many as 24 ships devoted exclusively to BMD patrols, on top of all its other commitments around the world.

No official Navy witness was on hand to give a response to these discussions. Although Taylor said that Navy Secretary Ray Mabus had offered to send someone — with the proviso he or she couldn’t discuss the upcoming budget submission — Taylor said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had nixed even that.

The Navy’s actual plans for its fiscal 2011 budget, its long-term ship and aviation goals, and a great deal of other information are expected in early February when the Pentagon submits its annual budget request.