New York Times

December 5, 2005

 

Navy To Expand Fleet With New Enemies In Mind

 

By David S. Cloud

 

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - The Navy wants to increase its fleet to 313 ships by 2020, reversing years of decline in naval shipbuilding and adding dozens of warships designed to defeat emerging adversaries, senior Defense Department officials say.

 

The plan by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, who took over as chief of naval operations last summer, envisions a major shipbuilding program that would increase the 281-ship fleet by 32 vessels and cost more than $13 billion a year, $3 billion more than the current shipbuilding budget, the officials said Friday.

 

While increasing the fleet size is popular with influential members of Congress, the plan faces various obstacles, including questions about whether it is affordable in light of ballooning shipbuilding costs and whether the mix of vessels is suitable to deal with emerging threats, like China's expanding navy.

 

"We are at a crisis in shipbuilding," a senior Navy official said. "If we don't start building this up next year and the next year and the next year, we won't have the force we need." The officials would not agree to be identified because the plan had not been made public or described to members of Congress.

 

The Navy's fleet reached its cold war peak of 568 warships in 1987 and has been steadily shrinking since then. Admiral Mullen's proposal would reverse that, expanding the fleet to as many as 325 ships over the next decade, with new ships put into service before some older vessels are retired, and finally settling at 313 between 2015 and 2020.

 

"The Navy appears to be grappling with the need to balance funding for supporting its role in the global war on terrorism against those for meeting a potential challenge from modernized Chinese maritime military forces," said Ronald O'Rourke, a naval analyst with the Congressional Research Service, an arm of the Library of Congress.

 

The plan has not been formally adopted by the Bush administration, though officials said it had been examined by senior civilians in the Pentagon as part of a larger strategic review of all military programs. The proposal is not expected to change much, if at all, before the review is made public in February, the officials said.

 

Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, which is home to major shipyards, endorsed the Navy proposal when told about it recently and called on President Bush to finance it in next year's budget.

 

"Military requirements should drive the budget, not the other way around," Ms. Collins said. "I hope that the Navy's requirement for a fleet of 313 ships will be matched with adequate funding in the president's budget to achieve that goal over time."

 

But Defense Department officials acknowledged that with financial pressures mounting and the overall Navy budget not likely to increase, their plans could come apart unless they could trim costs in other areas.

 

The Navy is planning to squeeze money from personnel and other accounts, and ask shipyards to hold down costs, even if it means removing certain capabilities.

 

Admiral Mullen is in some ways paying for the priorities of his predecessor, Adm. Vern Clark, who improved pay and benefits during his tenure as the service's senior officer but also agreed to trim the Navy's budget in an unusual sacrifice to help pay the Army's bills in Iraq.

 

Now Admiral Mullen is seeking a fleet that will give the Navy a greater role in counterterrorism and humanitarian operations.

 

The plan calls for building 55 small, fast vessels called littoral combat ships, which are being designed to allow the Navy to operate in shallow coastal areas where mines and terrorist bombings are a growing threat. Costing less than $300 million, the littoral combat ship is relatively inexpensive.

 

Navy officials say they have scaled back their goals for a new destroyer, the DD(X), whose primary purpose would be to support major combat operations ashore. The Navy once wanted 23 to 30 DD(X) vessels, but Admiral Mullen has decided on only 7, the Navy official said. The reduction is due in part to the ship's spiraling cost, now estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion per ship.

 

The plan also calls for building 19 CG(X) vessels, a new cruiser designed for missile defense, but the first ship is not due to be completed until 2017, the Navy official said.

 

The proposal would also reduce the fleet's more than 50 attack submarines to 48, the official said. Some Navy officials have called for keeping at least 55 of them.

 

The choices have led some analysts to suggest that the Navy is de-emphasizing the threat from China, at least in the early stages of the shipbuilding plan. Beijing's investment in submarines, cruise missiles and other weapon systems is not expected to pose a major threat to American warships for at least a decade. That gives the Navy time, some analysts argue, to build capabilities that require less firepower and more mobility, a priority for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

 

The plan also calls for building 31 amphibious assault ships, which can be used to ferry marines ashore or support humanitarian operations.

 

"This is not a fleet that is being oriented to the Chinese threat," said Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a policy research center in Arlington, Va. "It's being oriented around irregular warfare, stability operations and dealing with rogue states."

 

But the Navy would keep 11 aircraft carriers, just one fewer than the dozen it has maintained since the end of the cold war. Retiring the 37-year-old John F. Kennedy could save $1.2 billion a year.

Defense Today

December 16, 2005

Pg. 4

 

Rumsfeld On Increasing Fleet Size: Capabilities, Not Numbers, Count

 

By Dave Ahearn

 

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, asked about a plan to increase the Navy fleet size to 313 ships from the current 281 vessels, said it is capabilities that count, not numbers of ships.

 

The plan to bolster the fleet to a strength of 313 over many years is being advanced by Adm. Michael Mullen, chief of naval operations. His predecessor, Adm. Vern Clark, and Secretary of the Navy Gordon England previously had advanced a plan with a range of 260 to 325 ships and submarines by 2035.

 

Rumsfeld said there is too much focus on numbers, when the salient metric is the capability of weapons platforms together to place destructive power on targets.

 

The size of a force, and numbers of units in a force, is "the way we've always thought of it," but that thinking is wrong-headed, Rumsfeld said at a "Town Hall" meeting in the Pentagon for Department of Defense employees.

 

"We're trying to move away from size, numbers of things and mass," Rumsfeld said, and focus instead on the agility and speed of weapons platforms.

 

He noted that 50 dumb bombs may be required to destroy five targets, but a mere five smart bombs can do the same job.

 

Lighter, more agile and more intelligent systems "can be vastly more capable," he said.

 

Speed, too, can mean a platform can accomplish far more, far earlier in a combat campaign, compared to slow and ponderous assets, he said.

 

He noted, too, that with a smaller number of ships, the Navy nonetheless has obtained a great number of days on station, ready for action.

 

The Navy has used streamlined maintenance and ship overhaul procedures, swapping of crews on ships, forward stationing of ships near likely trouble spots and more to wring an increased number of days in action from the same fleet size.

 

Rather than numbers of ships, Rumsfeld said, the germane consideration is the total ability of whatever numbers of ships sail in the fleet to "put power on a target."

 

He also noted that the United States confronts "a different target today," referring to fast-moving, elusive insurgents, terrorists and rogue state units.

 

The secretary advised the Navy to "look at the ultimate effectiveness" of the fleet, whatever size it might be, "rather than numbers" of ships in the fleet.

 

If the fleet "is vastly more capable that" a previous larger fleet of old-technology ships, then "the deterrence effect is greater, and the [fighting ability] is greater."

 

He noted that the Navy, in responding to the tsunami in South Asia, demonstrated how rapidly the fleet can move when required.