Radical future for the Navy?

As we noted last month, the FY 2006 Navy shipbuilding request has been criticized "as the worst shipbuilding budget in ten years." Since our report, the debate has gotten more heated. Now the Navy not only wants to cut back the DD(X) destroyer program, but also wants to "recompete" it and award

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That has provoked considerable Congressional heat and steam.

Several factors are at play in the annual Navy shipbuilding wrangle between the Navy and the Congress. One, of course, is that the price of ships just keeps escalating. Without getting into the causes of that particular problem, we should note that it results in a hefty chunk of the Navy budget request having to be earmarked for "prior year completions." Another significant problem is that warships take a very long time to get from the drawing board to the water. Naval thinking on what types of ships are needed to meet current or probable threats can change much more rapidly than shipbuilders can complete ships.

Then, of course, there is the issue of what is the continuing workload necessary to maintain an industrial base adequate to produce the ships that the Navy requires.

A fundamental piece of information needed to make sensible decisions about the requirements for the industrial base is just how many ships the Navy is going to need, what kind of ships they will be, and when they will be needed.

For some time now the Navy has been sending mixed signals on the planned futures size of the fleet. Someone who has repeatedly pointed to this is Congressional Research Service analyst Ronald O'Rourke.

Since 2001, the future size of the fleet has been proposed by the Navy as somewhere between 243 and 375 ships.

Now the Navy has reportedly sent Congress a new 30-year shipbuilding plan that lays out a strategy for either a 260- or a 325-ship fleet

In the near term, the 30-year plan meshes with the Navy's FY 2006 proposals, according to Assistant Navy Secretary John J. Young.

What's also been sent to Congress is a study on "alternate fleet architecture" by the Office of Force Transformation (OFT). The OFT report, says CRS's O'Rourke, "calls into question the viability of the longstanding logic of naval force building" and presents an essentially clean-sheet proposal for a future Navy that would be radically different from the currently planned fleet. It was prepared under the direction of retired Navy Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who was OFT director from October 29, 2001 until January 31, 2005.

The OFT-recommended fleet would include large numbers of manned ships (mostly small, fast surface combatants), about the same number of carrier-based manned aircraft as in the Navy's planned fleet, and large numbers of unmanned systems.

The OFT architecture employs eight new ship designs, including four large surface ships that would be built from a common, relatively inexpensive, merchant-like hull design developed in 2004 for the Navy's Maritime Prepositioning Force (Future) analysis of alternatives. These four types of ships would all displace 57,000 tons.

The four other new-design ships in the OFT include a 13,500-ton aircraft carrier based on a conceptual surface effect ship/catamaran hull design that could carry a total of 10 manned aircraft, a 1,000-ton and a 100-ton surface combatant that would be similar in concept to the LCS but smaller, and an air-independent, non-nuclear submarine.

It remains to be seen whether the OFT report gets buried someplace or gets serious attention.