FYI
FYI
bttt
Way to go Jeff! Right in one of the top paragraphs too!
bump
Bumping!
Good article.
good post.
Meahwhile, our Navy has slid into political correctness hell. Check this out. http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/kathleenparker/2006/01/11/181896.html
Mullen Promises Stable Shipbuilding Plan
By CHRISTOPHER P. CAVAS, Defense News, January 17, 2006
The U.S. Navy’s top officer promised again last week to stabilize the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding plans and protect funds for new ships.
“The practice around town has been, for far too long, to pay other bills by robbing the shipbuilding accounts,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chief of naval operations, said Jan. 11. “We’re not going to do that any more.”
“We’re going to stabilize the whole process,” he said. But he cautioned industry would have to do its part.
“I’m going to give them a plan they can build to,” he said. “But then I am going to expect them to help me keep [the ships] affordable.”
Mullen spoke on the first day of the Surface Navy Association’s annual three-day conference of surface warfare officers, Pentagon executives and industry representatives. During his keynote address, he reiterated his support for DD(X), the Navy’s cutting-edge technology destroyer that, at an estimated $3.3 billion cost for the first ships, has been a controversial football in Congress.
“We need DD(X),” he said, and highlighted the stealth ship’s ability to expand the areas in which it can operate.
“I’ve seen lots of press reports about how it’s in trouble,” he said. “The critics are wrong. DD(X) is well-supported in the halls of Congress, the Navy and in the Department of Defense.”
New Fleet Plan
The first two DD(X) ships are expected to appear in the fiscal 2007 budget request, due to be publicly unveiled Feb. 6 along with the Quadrennial Defense Review, which includes Mullen’s new plan for a 313-ship fleet. Mullen declined to discuss details of the plan.
But several naval budget analysts who spoke Jan. 11 cautioned that the new fleet plan is unaffordable.
Eric Labs of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), citing press reports of the plan, noted that the Navy’s reported estimate of $13.4 billion per year to build the fleet raises “questions about the viability and executability of the 313-ship fleet.” That price, he noted, would be a one-third increase in annual funding from recent years.
CBO’s analysis, he said, “shows a more grim outlook.” Labs estimated the real cost at $18.3 billion per year over 30 years.
Even more, Labs said, the plan doesn’t appear to satisfy the requirements for certain ship types, such as attack submarines or large surface combatants. Factoring in those requirements, he said, would raise the annual cost to $20.9 billion per year in new ship construction.
Ron O’Rourke of the Congressional Research Service — who, like Labs, cautioned he was speaking on his own behalf and not for his organization — noted similar deficiencies in the plan’s ability to satisfy the required numbers of DD(X) destroyers and CG(X) cruisers, as well as DDG(X), a follow-on design planned to replace Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in the late 2020s.
O’Rourke noted that the Navy plans to begin acquiring one DD(X) and one CG(X) in the same year beginning in 2011. But if affordability issues slide those numbers to one per year, a shortfall in those types of ships will occur.
The Navy’s plan, he said, “depends on a lot of things working out the way the Navy hopes, with few or no bad surprises. But things don’t always work out the way you hope, and unforeseen budget shocks do occur.” Such a scenario, he said, “appears very possible.”
A serious problem, he added, may not develop for several years, “at which point it will be someone else’s problem to fix.”
Interservice Relations
Mullen spoke more forcefully than in past addresses about the need for better Navy-Coast Guard cooperation. He has been criticized by Coast Guard supporters for not paying enough attention to the smaller sea service.
“Next to the Marine Corps,” he said, “I view our relationship with the Coast Guard as the single most critical relationship” in securing the seas.
Citing the need for better interservice cooperation, Mullen said he wanted to coordinate research and development efforts, acquisition, logistics, exercises and deployments with the Coast Guard.
“I want to better understand how they work,” he said, “and I want them to know more about us.”
Riverine Warfare
A discussion of the Navy’s new Naval Expeditionary Combat Command provoked a good deal of interest on Jan. 11. Young naval officers interested in taking part posed numerous questions, and several Vietnam-era veterans of riverine warfare stood up to offer their assistance to the new command, which was commissioned Jan. 13 in Little Creek, Va. Rear Adm. Jay Bowling, the Navy’s deputy director for expeditionary warfare, told at least one veteran he’d accept his offer of help.
Bowling told the audience the new command would “push the fight inland” by carrying out patrol and interdiction duties. “The squadrons are offensive, not defensive,” he said.
The first of three 20-boat, 210-sailor units is set to begin training this summer and deploy to Iraq in March 2007 “to relieve the stress on the Marine Corps” in patrolling inland waterways.
But the riverine effort, Bowling said, is not contingent on the Iraq war. Other possible areas for deployment, he said, are west Africa and northern South America. •
Your comments on the discussion from post number 40 on?