Future Senate-House Tussle Will Affect the Fate of Navy’s Carrier Fleet
When the House and Senate Armed Services Committees negotiate differences in their versions of the fiscal year 2007 defense authorization bill later this year, the future of the Navy’s carrier fleet will be one of the biggest, and perhaps most contentious, items on the table.
The two chambers differ widely on the carrier issue, with the Senate, led by powerful Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., in favor of the Navy’s decision to retire the 38-year-old USS John F. Kennedy, last deployed in 2004 to support operations in Iraq.
“It is very clear that the ship itself, from a mechanical and operational standpoint, cannot perform its principal mission,” he said.
Warner’s statements this year are in stark contrast to his original opposition to Kennedy’s retirement, and his support for a provision in the fiscal 2006 defense authorization bill that prohibited the Navy from doing so.
But a year and several studies later, Warner said it is the “clear and unequivocal judgment of the Navy” that the time has come to stand down the ship.
Warner has taken the floor in recent weeks to argue that maintaining Kennedy costs $20 million a month — a hefty bill that would eat into the Navy’s plans to boost its fleet from 281 to 313 ships.
House lawmakers, meanwhile, remain staunchly opposed to decommissioning the historic Kennedy, a move that would reduce the carrier fleet from 12 to 11 ships.
House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and other lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have argued the Navy’s decision was a budgetary one — and that the military needs at least a dozen carriers to respond to operations worldwide.
“I think you lose a lot when you retire [Kennedy],” said House Armed Services Projection Forces Subcommittee ranking member Gene Taylor, D-Miss.
Taylor also acknowledged, however, that the issue is a political one — particularly in an election year. Retiring Kennedy, now stationed at Mayport, Fla., would cost countless jobs and lucrative maintenance contracts.
An aide to a legislator who supports keeping Kennedy in the fleet conceded that the sentiment is stronger in the House than in the Senate. But, the aide stressed, there are members of both chambers who are leery of reducing the size of the carrier fleet.
“The Navy’s hurting,” the aide said. “We’d rather help them solve their financial problem in other ways than increase risk in carriers.”
Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, a Senate Armed Services member, could be the most likely opponent to the Navy’s carrier plans in the upper chamber. But Nelson, who is in a re-election campaign against Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla., recently said he had not decided how he would approach the issue during conference.
Nelson has been pushing the Navy to station a nuclear-powered carrier at Mayport, and presumably would not want to jeopardize those chances by going head-to-head with Navy brass over Kennedy.
It is too soon to tell the outcome of the debate, many sources said. But Warner and his influential presumed successor, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., tend to walk away from the conference discussions with most of their top policy and funding priorities intact.
One source who tracks the bill noted that the House could use the carrier, affectionately referred to as “Big John,” as political leverage to ensure other provisions in the bill, passed by the House in mid-May on a 396-31 vote, make it into the final legislation.
The House, for instance, authorized money in its version of the defense bill to begin building two submarines a year in 2009, three years earlier than the Navy plans. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s bill stuck to the Navy’s submarine plans.
But the Navy isn’t taking any chances on the carrier issue, and intends to increase the pressure the closer the bill gets to conference, which could be later this summer. At press time, the Senate was beginning to debate Warner’s bill.
“It will be the big fight of the summer,” one senior Navy official said. “There is a huge amount of concern. Politics is really ruining what should really be a national security issue.”
Study Favors Carrier Buys Over Refueling
The Navy could modernize its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier (CVN) force faster by building new carriers more quickly and retiring approximately half of the 10 Nimitz-class carriers at their mid-life point by foregoing planned nuclear refueling and complex overhauls, according to a new study conducted by the RAND National Defense Research Institute.
By accelerating construction of the next-generation carriers, the CVN 21 class, in two-year intervals rather than the current four years, the Navy could equip its force completely with CVN 21 ships by 2036, 22 years earlier than currently planned, the report said.
Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding is building the 10th and last Nimitz carrier and is designing the succeeding CVN 21 class. Under current Navy planning, the first CVN 21 ship, CVN 78, would replace the USS Enterprise by 2015, and succeeding CVN 21s would, in turn, replace the Nimitz-class carriers on a one-for-one basis.
The Navy currently is sequencing each Nimitz-class carrier through a refueling and complex overhaul (RCOH) at Newport News, Va., after approximately 23 years of service, extending the service life another 23 years for a total life of 49 years, including the three-year RCOH. As each ship completes RCOH, the next oldest ship begins the cycle. The first two Nimitz-class carriers have completed RCOH and the third began its cycle in November.
The RAND study said that terminating Nimitz RCOHs after the next two carriers — for a total of five completed — and accelerating CVN 21 construction to two-year intervals would accrue savings by negating the refueling costs, and from more efficient use of construction yards and workers and the lower personnel and maintenance costs anticipated with the CVN 21s. The plan would recoup accelerated construction costs to the point that the total carrier costs are only up to 12 percent above (averaging $700 million annually) the current plan totals through 2015.
Democrats Seek Renewal Of Investigations Panel
Pointing to “ongoing problems” in Iraq and accounting and acquisition failures within the Pentagon, House Armed Services Committee Democrats are pushing Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., to re-establish a subcommittee on oversight and investigations.
In a June 9 letter to Hunter, all 28 Democratic panel members urged him to “take immediate action” to reinstate the subcommittee, which was dissolved in 1995.
“We do not believe this committee has done sufficient oversight or serious investigative work given the magnitude of the problems facing our nation and the military,” the letter stated. “Corruption and incompetence have severely hampered our reconstruction efforts [in Iraq] … and the acquisition process continues to result in fewer and more expensive weapons systems.”
A spokesman for Hunter said the committee has dispersed investigations to all six Armed Service subcommittees — a move that expands the panel’s oversight capabilities.
CBO: Shipbuilding Plan Costs, Goals Don’t Add Up
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that the Navy cannot afford the ships it intends to buy under its 30-year shipbuilding plan announced last summer.
“The Navy has set strict cost goals for itself to execute its 2006 plan for shipbuilding,” the report states. “Nevertheless, the [CBO] estimates that the Navy would need a substantial funding increase to carry out its current plan.”
The CBO presented five options to cut costs and focus on various priority items, including lowering procurement of CVN 21 carriers and reducing aircraft programs.
House Armed Services Projection Forces Subcommittee Chairman Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., declined to support any of the five options, but said the study validated his concerns about the shipbuilding plan’s costs.
Navy Selects 19 Ships For Decommissioning
The Navy plans to remove 19 ships from service between June 2006 and September 2007, according to a directive from Vice Adm. Lewis W. Crenshaw Jr., deputy chief of naval operations for resources, requirements and assessments.
Four Osprey-class coastal minehunters were decommissioned in June and will be joined by four more by Sept. 30, 2007, which will leave only four coastal minehunters in the fleet, all Naval Reserve Force ships. The cuts come as the Navy shifts from specialized mine warfare ships to organic mine-countermeasures capability resident in some Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and the future Littoral Combat Ships.
In addition, four Los Angeles-class attack submarines are slated for deactivation between November 2006 and September 2007. Also scheduled for decommissioning in October is the Navy’s only remaining diesel-electric powered submarine, the auxiliary research submarine USS Dolphin.
The fleet introduction this year of the first San Antonio-class amphibious platform dock ship and its forthcoming sister ships is allowing the Navy to decommission four older Austin-class amphibious platform dock ships between September 2006 and September 2007.
One big-deck amphibious assault ship, the Tarawa-class USS Saipan, will be decommissioned in April 2007. Only one ship of the Military Sealift Command, the fleet oiler USNS Joshua Humphreys, is scheduled to be cut.
Reporting by Seapower Correspondent Megan Scully. Managing Editor Richard R. Burgess contributed to this report.
