By Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ own rules, the Pentagon should purchase weapons based on what military forces need, instead of spending money as a pretext for creating or saving jobs in the industrial base.
Navy ships may be an exception, however.
Intense pressure from members of Congress who want to protect employment at the nation’s top shipyards will limit the Pentagon’s options as it begins a sweeping review of military strategy and equipment needs.
The stakes are high for the Navy, which is trying to solidify support for boosting its shipbuilding budget and increasing the size of its fleet.
In the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, Gates directed the military services to objectively analyze their current and future needs and provide thorough justification for why certain weapon systems should stay or go.
“Rather than go forward under the same assumptions that guided our shipbuilding during the Cold War, I believe we need to develop a more rigorous analytical framework, before moving forward, the type of framework that will be provided by the Quadrennial Defense Review,” Gates said in a speech last month at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island.
But Gates also acknowledged that, regardless of the outcome of the QDR, he expects industrial base considerations to play a major role in shipbuilding programs. “Some things never change,” said Gates. When the nation’s first secretary of war, Henry Knox, decided to build a fleet to combat pirates, “to get the necessary support from Congress, he eventually ended up with six frigates being built in six different shipyards in six states,” said Gates.
Much of the shipbuilding debate in the QDR will center on the Navy’s stated need for a next-generation stealthy cruiser. The service already can rest assured that its Littoral Combat Ship is not in jeopardy. Gates said he hopes to accelerate the program. “Despite its development problems, it is a versatile ship that can be produced in quantity and go to places that are either too shallow or too dangerous for the Navy's big, blue-water surface combatants.”
But a new cruiser may be a tougher sell. According to John Young, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official, an estimated price tag of $6 billion per ship would put the cruiser out of reach. “The Defense Department cannot afford a $6 billion cruiser,” Young said.
Gates is unlikely to support such an expensive ship. “As we saw [in April], you don't necessarily need a billion-dollar ship to chase down a bunch of teenage pirates. The size of a ship in such cases is less important than having Navy SEALs onboard,” Gates said. “To carry out the missions we may face in the future, whether dealing with non-state actors at sea and near shore, or swarming speedboats, we will need numbers, speed, and ability to operate in shallow waters.”
The QDR will scrutinize the future of the blue-water fleet and the “overall strategy behind the kinds of ships we're buying,” Gates said. He does not want a repeat of the DDG-1000 destroyer program, which after decades in development, became too expensive and the Navy decided it no longer wanted it. “The need to show presence and project power from a piece of sovereign territory called a United States Navy ship will never go away. But we cannot allow more ships to go the way of the DDG-1000, where, since its inception, the projected buy has dwindled from 32 to three, as costs per ship have more than doubled.”
To make up for the cutbacks in the DDG-1000 buy, Gates endorsed a Navy proposal to restart production of Arleigh Burke destroyers. The service had intended to close the production line after it received the 64 ships that are in the current program.
The ship-swapping arrangement, Gates said, was pursued in order to save money. But industrial base factors clearly influenced the decision.
It is not clear exactly how much money the Navy would save by foregoing the DDG-1000 in favor of the DDG-51. A Navy spokesman said the service has no cost estimates yet. Young said that restarting the DDG-51 program could cost $2.3 billion in fiscal year 2010 and that the first two ships each would cost $1.7 billion.
The DDG-1000 is expected to run $3.2 billion for the first ship, and possible somewhat less for the second and third.
The Navy essentially has given up on the idea that competition between shipyards helps drive down costs, Young said. “It’s about allocation and not competition.”
In general, competition is a “good thing,” he said. In many shipbuilding programs, it is not a realistic option. The current plan calls for General Dynamics Bath Iron Works to build all three DDG-1000s, although some of the components will be produced by competitor Northrop Grumman Ship Systems. In exchange for allowing the Navy to consolidate production at Bath, the service agreed to allocate the first two ships of the new DDG-51s to Northrop Grumman.
“You are not going to have meaningful competition going forward,” said Young. “At one point we wanted winner take all competitions. But Congress outlawed them.
