Navy sets shipbuilding goals requiring big funding boost

The Navy sent Congress an extremely ambitious 30-year shipbuilding plan Tuesday that would reverse the decline in the fleet and build it up from the current 285 ships to 315 in five years and sustain it above that number for more than a decade.

But to make that plan work, the Navy must get its annual ship construction funding up from the proposed fiscal 2007 level of $9.7 billion to $13.5 billion in two years, keep it at that level or higher for decades and get the average cost of its ships down substantially.

"Clearly, my goal is to have a plan that is stable, that the industry can build to," Adm. Michael Mullen, the chief of naval operations, said at a Pentagon briefing. And, he added, "I have a cost-reduction requirement. I intend to take cost out of all our ships."

The plan was welcomed by the president of the American Shipbuilding Association, Cynthia Brown, as "a good start from where we are today, to turn things around. The Navy recognizes its requirements for naval ships is much larger than the fleet it has today or will have" under previous plans.

But a number of naval analysts have warned that getting the higher amount of shipbuilding funds that the plan requires and getting a lower cost of ships would be very difficult.

The plan was required by the Armed Services committees, whose members have complained repeatedly over the years of the rapid drop in the size of the combat fleet, from the high of nearly 600 in the early 1990s. The current fleet is the Navy's smallest since just before World War I.

Although Mullen said the optimum size of the fleet is 313 ships, the long-range plan shows a quick growth to 315 in fiscal 2012 and to 330 six years later. The fleet then would begin to shrink again, dropping below 300 by 2020.

But future defense plans are notoriously unreliable, even when looking ahead several years, let alone three decades.

Mullen said the shipbuilding plan was endorsed in the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review and is supported by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

To maintain the buildup would require an average annual ship construction account of $13.5 billion over the decades, he said. "I don't think that is out of reach."

Mullen conceded, however, that he did not expect the total Navy budget to grow substantially, meaning he would have to find the additional ship funds elsewhere in the service's funding.

The plan sets out the optimum fleet force structure as 11 aircraft carriers, 88 large surface combatants -- destroyers and cruisers -- 55 of the relatively small Littoral Combat Ships, 48 attack submarines, 14 ballistic missile submarines, four of the missile boats converted to carry conventional missiles and special operations troops, 31 "expeditionary" vessels, 30 combat logistic ships, 12 Maritime Preposition Force (Future) ships and 20 support vessels.

But the plan shows that force rising above those numbers in some classes and falling below in others. The attack submarine force, for example, falls to 40 near the end of the plan.

Brown said one of her disappointments in the plan is the failure to build more than one submarine a year before 2012, which would make it difficult to meet Mullen's goal of cutting the $2 billion cost of the subs by one third.