Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) nudged fellow lawmakers on the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee yesterday to bankroll the Navy’s National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund (SBDF), included in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act separate from the service’s general shipbuilding (SCN) account. “We’re now in the beginning of reconstituting our seaborne deterrence, and I would hope that this committee will look very favorably in providing funds through that mechanism which could be applied to…the need to supplement the shipbuilding fund.” While the SBDF is authorized to receive up to $3.5 billion in unobligated balances from Fiscal Years 2014-2016, it remains unfunded.
During a Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on Navy and Marine Corps FY 2016 budget requests, Reed spoke in response to a warning by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus that the service could sustain “very harmful” service-wide effects if Congress does not plus up the SCN account or fails to prioritize funding for the Ohio-class Replacement (OR) as an SCN-independent national asset. “I can’t stress how harmful the effects will be on either the fleet or everything else in the Navy,” he said.
Mabus pointed to what he called a “dramatically” increased Navy shipbuilding budget during the 1976-1992 procurement for the current Ohio-class submarines and a funding boost for the “41 for Freedom” ballistic missile submarines in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mabus said those funding hikes did not shield SCN from monetary impacts, and he told reporters after the hearing that those examples illustrate a strong OR funding case to make to Congress. In the early 1980s, “Navy shipbuilding was almost doubled,” Mabus told reporters after the hearing. “But even that wasn’t enough to halt the rest of the fleet going down about 40 percent. So you got two issues here—We’ve got to have strategic deterrence. It’s the most survivable leg of the triad. It is a national program, and you have to recapitalize it from time to time. But on the other side, you’ve got the Navy outside the strategic deterrence, and we’ve got to have a balanced enough Navy to do the missions that we do. And those are the things in conflict, and that’s the reason why we think either a separate fund or plussing up the Navy shipbuilding budget” will help secure OR procurement.