September 17, 2014

Navy Secretary: Ohio-class Replacement Sub Could Drain Navy Shipbuilding Budget

By ExchangeMonitor

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said this week that the production of 12 Ohio-class submarine replacements could drain the Navy’s shipbuilding budget for longer than a decade. Officials have publicly announced the Ohio replacement as a priority, and a recent Center for Strategic Budget Analysis report estimated the Ohio replacement as the second most expensive current Defense Department acquisition program—behind the F-35—at a total cost of $90 billion.

The Navy plans to start building the replacement subs in 2021, with the first production unit being activated in 2028, and Mabus said production of the machines could halve the service’s shipbuilding budget for the next 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,” he said during a Monday appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. The House and Senate Armed Services committees each included language in their versions of the Fiscal Year 2015 Defense Authorization Act earlier this year to create a National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund, setting aside funding for the nuclear submarines that is separate from the rest of the Navy’s budget.

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