Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
1/30/2015
Amidst a crippling budget environment, the Navy will support its No. 1 priority, the Ohio-Class Replacement nuclear submarine and plans to spend $5 billion from Fiscal Years 2017 to 2020 in advanced procurement funding for the first submarine, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 27.The project is creating significant pressure on the Navy’s shipbuilding budget, and by 2021, the Navy projects to eclipse its shipbuilding budget by $9 billion, Greenert said. That’s “very difficult to do,” Greenert said, adding: “We have to do it, though…so we’ll have to continue to work in that regard.” Estimates for the Ohio-class replacement range from $79 billion to $100 billion.
Testifying at a SASC hearing examining the effects of sequestration on national security, Greenert and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh—whose purviews encompass the entire nuclear triad—joined heads of the Army and Marine Corps in the latest chapter of an ongoing Defense Department effort to convince Congress to reverse sequestration, notorious in the strategic defense community for creating acquisition delays and program and personnel cuts.
Sens. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) directly asked Welsh and Greenert about sequestration’s impacts on the nuclear enterprise. Responding to Donnelly, Greenert expressed determination that the Navy would align resources to continue development of Ohio-class replacement submarines regardless of sequestration, but highlighted possible hiring delays during a lean schedule. “If we are sequestered, we lose months [of] hiring engineers,” he said.
Downgrade to a Dyad?
Heinrich asked Welsh if downgrading the nuclear triad to a dyad was a possibility, one day after retired Gen. James Mattis, former commander of U.S. Central Command, during a Jan. 27 SASC hearing said the government should consider eliminating the land-based leg of the nuclear triad in light of a shifting international security landscape. “While we don’t want or need a military that is, at the same time, dominant and irrelevant, you must sort this out and deny funding for bases or capabilities no longer needed,” Mattis said. “The nuclear stockpile must be tended to and fundamental questions must be asked and answered. We must clearly establish the role of our nuclear weapons. Do they serve solely to deter nuclear war? If so, we should say so, and the resulting clarity will help to determine the number we need.” Mattis added that eliminating the land-based nuclear deterrent could reduce false-alarm threats.
Welsh acknowledged he didn’t think the triad-versus-dyad discussion would “ever go away,” but he said he was a “believer” in the triad. While Air Force’s Office of Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration (A10), U.S. Strategic Command and Global Strike Command officials have recently pushed to modernize the entire bomber and ICBM fleets as old systems age out, Welsh indicated that tradeoffs could lie within the existing triad structure. “We clearly have to have discussions that involve the Air Force, the Navy, the department, the Congress, the National Security Council, and the White House to decide where is the nation going to go with this?” he said. “We just don’t have enough money in our budgets in the Air Force and the Navy to do all of the modernization that you would need to do if we took everybody’s desire and tried to meet it.”
AF Industrial Base Needs Strengthening
The Air Force industrial base, including its nuclear infrastructure, has been “intentionally underfunded” to support individual and unit readiness, Welsh said, and the bills for the nuclear enterprise are coming due. “We’re at a point in time where we have got to start modernizing and recapitalizing some of that infrastructure in terms of facilities that were built 50 years ago now,” Welsh said. “We have an investment plan designed. It’s prepared to be put into place.”
Welsh added that sequestration would push almost all facility maintenance and proposed new buildings off the funding table. “We do have a requirement as a nation to make decisions on what do we want to recapitalize and modernize in terms of nuclear weapons and nuclear command-and-control capability over the next 15 to 20 years and how it affects the Air Force and the Navy,” Welsh said.
The Air Force on Jan. 23 released an RFI for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent weapon system, which details preliminary plans to overhaul the nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) architecture including old command systems and buried 50-year-old cables. “The decisions on [nuclear weapons and NC3] need to be made in the near future. Sequestration and [Budget Control Act] caps will limit the amount of things you can do in that arena and they’ll make those decisions more important to make earlier so we don’t waste money leading into the time when those things have to be done,” he said.
Uncertainty Surrounds Naval Shipyards
Greenert expressed doubt about the future of shipyards if caps associated with the 2011 Budget Control Act return. “We talked about the importance of the nuclear deterrence,” Greenert said in response to a question by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.). “Well, these public shipyards underwrite all that. That’s our SSBNs. And because of Portsmouth [Naval Shipyard straddling Maine and New Hampshire], I can do work in the other shipyards on the SSBNs. Portsmouth is a major, major part of a ship maintenance enterprise that we must have. And I worry about it in sequestration.” Part of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s reforms for the nuclear enterprise, Defense Department officials in November announced Navy plans to hire approximately 2,450 civilian shipyard and refit facility workers.
Implications for Ohio Replacement Contractors
While Greenert said he “would worry less” about prime contractor Electric Boat’s ability to continue work on the Ohio Replacement during sequestration, he expressed concern about the fate of the project’s subprimes, which comprise B&W and Huntington Ingalls. Subprimes contribute a great deal to nuclear technology, and are “key” to building the SSBN(X)s, Greenert said. “That’s a huge asymmetric advantage of ours,” he said. “That goes at risk when—if these smaller businesses close—where do we go? Do we go overseas? I mean, this is a really serious subject.” While the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act approved $3.5 billion in unobligated balances from FYs 2014, 2015 and 2016, to be put in a set-aside National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund account, Congress has not authorized greater funding beyond the general shipbuilding budget. Recently, the Navy has repeatedly cited the need for additional top-line relief.
