U.S. Navy Shipbuilding Could Fall Short

The recent congressional authorization of the U.S. Navy’s 2011 shipbuilding acquisition plan is both good and bad news for the service.

Of course, like any service, the Navy could not be happier that lawmakers supported all of its major shipbuilding and conversion requests for the year, to the tune of $16 billion. But in approving the plan, lawmakers also kept the Navy on a collision course with its long-term fleet goals, according to analysts. The math simply does not add up, the analysts say, for what the Navy has planned now and what it expects its force structure to be in coming years, financially or operationally.

That is a point that federal analysts have tried to hammer home for some time.

“The planned size of the Navy, the rate of Navy ship procurement, and the prospective affordability of the Navy’s shipbuilding plans have been matters of concern for the congressional defense committees for the past several years,” the Congressional Research Service (CRS) states in its recent report on Navy force structure and shipbuilding plans.

Congress is now trying to get the Navy to navigate a bit more true. In authorizing the Navy plan, lawmakers noted, “The Navy’s shipbuilding plan should reflect the shipbuilding requirements that are outlined in the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).”

To better align the Navy’s plans with the QDR, the bill changes the reporting requirements of the 30-year shipbuilding schedule.

But aligning the plan better with the QDR is not the same thing as an alignment with reality. As the CRS notes in its report, the problem is with the Navy’s internal math, not its external matchup with the QDR. The Navy’s Fiscal 2011 30-year — Fiscal 2011-40 — shipbuilding plan includes 276 ships, CRS points out. “The plan does not include enough ships to fully support all elements of the 313-ship plan over the long run,” CRS states.

The Navy projects that implementing the 30-year plan would result in a fleet that grows from 284 ships in Fiscal 2011 to 315 ships in Fiscal 2020, reaches a peak of 320 ships in Fiscal 2024, drops below 313 ships in Fiscal 2027, declines to 288 ships in Fiscal 2032-33, and then increases to 301 ships in Fiscal 2039-40.

“The Navy projects that the attack submarine and cruiser-destroyer forces will drop substantially below required levels in the latter years of the 30-year plan,” the report states.

And there are financial worries too. The Navy estimates that executing the 30-year shipbuilding plan would require an average of $15.9 billion per year in constant Fiscal 2010 dollars, CRS says, pointing out that a May 2010 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report estimates that the plan would require an average of $19 billion per year in constant Fiscal 2010 dollars, or about 19% more than the Navy estimates.

“If the Navy receives the same amount of funding for ship construction in the next 30 years as it has over the past three decades — an average of about $15 billion a year in 2010 dollars — it will not be able to afford all of the purchases in the 2011 plan,” CBO says.