A number of former US SECNAVs weigh in on this article:
Breaking DefenseQuote:
Industry Can Build 355 Ships, But Which Ones?
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on November 15, 2017 at 5:39 PM
WASHINGTON: Sure, American industry can build the 355-ship fleet both Trump and the admirals want, three former Navy Secretaries said today. We can even build it a lot faster than most experts expect, but there are a lot of ifs. If we start using small shipyards that currently don’t build warships. If we streamline procurement, and, of course, If Congress can finally bust Budget Control Act caps on spending. Those three obstacles, of course, have defied reformers for years.
And after we do all that, we still might not have the right 355 ships, two of the secretaries warned. Those small yards can build small vessels like the Littoral Combat Ship, but they will struggle to build large, complex combatants like destroyers. They definitely can’t build nuclear-powered submarines or aircraft carriers, the crucial capital ships of modern naval warfare.
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Danzig & O’Keefe: Wait A Minute
If you go to small yards for small ships in large numbers, you’ll short-change the big ships needed for a big war, argued Richard Danzig, Navy Secretary under Clinton. “Fundamentally, the rationale for the Navy, the importance of the Navy to this republic, is the ability to fight even when we get into a major conflict…. If you raise the flag of 350 or 355 ships as the measure of our well being.. we will motivate people to build more and more at the low end and less and less at the high end, and it’s the high-end capability that we need.”
NASA photo
“350 ships or any number you choose is a bumper sticker,” agreed Sean O’Keefe, who served as Navy Secretary under George W. Bush (and ran NASA for H.W.). The right number and mix of ships needs to derive from some kind of strategy, he said, “which has yet to be really articulated in this administration.”
Can industry ramp up to build 355 ships? Sure, Danzig and O’Keefe agreed. But if you’re asking that, “you’re asking the wrong question,” O’Keefe told me. A better question, is “what kind of ships you’re looking for?
“It really does begin with the proposition of what is it you’re trying to scale to and what are the capabilities you’re looking for…which you don’t know,” O’Keefe said, because there’s no strategy. “When you get merely a numeric target, that doesn’t tell you much of anything.
“If you’re saying there’s a fixed number of low-(end) vessels, there are any number of different yards that can scale in relatively short order to accommodate that,” he said. “If you’re looking at the high end” — such as an Aegis destroyer, let alone a nuclear-powered vessel –“you have a much smaller number (of yards).”
“You would need to invest in transforming it (the industrial base),” Danzig told me. “That’s something I think we can do.” You’d need not only to expand the capabilities of the smaller yards, but diversify the bigger ones.
“I’m not saying we ought to make this huge investment,” Danzig hastened to say. “I’m just saying, if you want to go down the path that John is urging, (it’s possible). If you’re talking about a long-term building program — as inevitably you are — you can ramp up the industrial base.”
The industrial base isn’t the problem, Danzig and O’Keefe agreed. It’s everything else. In particular, it’s the money. Even if the Navy gets the funding for 355 ships of whatever kind, it also needs money to man and maintain them, or else you get a large but low-quality “hollow force.”
Crews must be recruited, trained, and given time to rest between deployments. Ships must be repaired, upgraded, and overhauled, all requiring significant time between deployments. And all these bills must be paid year after year after year, for 25, 30, 40, or 50 years (for LCS, submarines, destroyers, and carriers respectively) after the initial, crowd-pleasing contract to build the ship is signed.
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