Four months after Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the estimated $100 billion Ohio-Class Replacement could “gut” the service’s shipbuilding budget, a senior budget analyst on Friday told reporters the program and its Sea-Based Deterrence fund could siphon money from other branches of the military as well. “[J]ust because you reclassify the budget account, it doesn’t get you out of the budget cap,” said Todd Harrison, Senior Fellow for Defense Budget Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “It doesn’t even get you out of the DoD budget, so you’re just relabeling it. So really what the Navy’s trying to do is make this a separate account so they can take budget share out of the other services to pay for it.”
The National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2015 contains a Sea-Based Deterrence Fund, an account that stands separate from the Navy’s general shipbuilding budget. The NDAA for FY 2015 authorizes a shift of up to $3.5 billion in unobligated balances from FYs 2014, 2015 and 2016 into the account designed to bankroll work on the Ohio-Class Replacement ballistic missile submarine. During a Council on Foreign Relations event in September, Mabus highlighted calls by Navy leadership for debates on how to fund the Ohio-Class Replacement, which is estimated to require half of the service’s shipbuilding budget for 12 years. “It has the potential to gut the rest of our shipbuilding programs or something else, because I sort of reject the notion that the only way you pay for a ship is to take it out of another ship, but you’ve got to take it from somewhere,” Mabus said.
Harrison said the Navy should simply ask for more money to fund the Navy’s No. 1 priority, whose standalone fund creates a zero-sum game in a budget-capped environment. Harrison echoed the words of Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Sean Stackley during an Atlantic Council event last month. “It’s a zero sum,” Stackley said. “We still have to get money funded into that account. So the sources of the money are still in question. So while I call this a good first step, we’ve got a long way to go to resolve the issue.” Harrison touted Navy officials’ forthrightness in warning Congress and the public that the service can’t fit the Ohio-Class Replacement into its shipbuilding budget amidst an austere fiscal climate and as it approaches a “huge” fiscal bow wave of modernization, and added that the service should be straightforward in its discussions to secure funding for the project. “Let’s just be honest with ourselves that this is a priority of the nation, one we’re going to pay for, and that’s going to come at the expense of something else,” Harrison said. Pending a repeal of sequestration or another legislation measure, the defense budget will be capped at approximately $500 billion for FY 2016, while analysts have said the Defense Department plans to ask for $585 billion.
