Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
3/13/2015
Will the Navy fund the Ohio-class Replacement (OR) through its shipbuilding budget, through a separate Navy fund, or through the larger Defense Department account? Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert on March 10 told Senators he wants to find a specific vehicle to appropriate money toward the Sea-Based Deterrence Fund, naming those three hypotheticals. “Is it just other Navy shipbuilding accounts?” he said. “Is it just other Navy appropriations? Or do we mean the whole Department of Defense could contribute to this fund which, in my view, would be great.” The account was written into the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act to fund the Ohio-class Replacement. It stands outside the Navy’s general shipbuilding budget, and allows up to $3.5 billion in unobligated balances from Fiscal Years 2014-2016 to be allocated toward the program.
Todd Harrison, Senior Fellow for Defense Budget Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, predicted during a February press briefing that the Sea-Based Deterrence Fund would draw money from one of the other service’s coffers, such as the Army budget. “If they need more money to pay for the Ohio Replacement, ask for more money,” Harrison said. “It’s a zero-sum game in a budget-capped environment, the money has to come from somewhere, so let’s just admit it’s going to come from the Army.” Appropriators have yet to put any money into the Sea-Based Deterrence Fund.
In response to a question by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) during a full hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Greenert cited the need to pursue the “clarity of intent” of Congress to establish funding sources. Reed said the account is intended to be funded through the larger DoD budget, and signaled to the officials—Greenert and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus—that Congress would work to hash out specific avenues. “The clarification we’ll try to produce for you, sir,” Reed told Greenert.
OR Bill Footed by Navy Could “Devastate” the Service
Mabus told the committee that if all funding for the estimated $139 billion OR came from the Navy, the project would “devastate” parts of the service, “either our shipbuilding or readiness or something, because of the high cost of these and because we don’t recapitalize them very often,” he said. Echoing statements he made during last week’s Navy hearing at the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Mabus said precedence for an OR plus-up lies in past funding increases for ballistic missile submarine acquisitions, such as the “41 for Freedom” in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the Ohio-class submarine from the late 1970s through 1992.
But funding spikes for those generations of SSBNs weren’t enough to protect the rest of the shipbuilding budget. “Both times Navy shipbuilding was increased pretty dramatically to accommodate the summaries,” Mabus said. “But to show you the effects from ‘76 to ‘80, Navy shipbuilding budget doubled to accommodate the Ohio-class, our fleet still declined by 40 percent because it simply wasn’t enough to do both.” The Navy is working to boost its number of ships from 275 to more than 300, and senior service officials have increasingly cited concerns about reaching that goal alongside OR procurement.
