Key House lawmakers criticize shipbuilding plan

The top Democrat and Republican on the House Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee Friday signaled they might significantly alter the Navy's fiscal 2009 budget request for shipbuilding to give priority to programs that have met their cost and schedule goals.

During a hearing with Navy officials Friday, Seapower Subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor, D-Miss., and ranking member Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., both expressed frustration with the Navy's proposal to buy seven new ships next year, calling the request too modest to meet the Navy's goal of fielding a modern 313-ship fleet.

"The current shipbuilding plan for the 313-ship fleet is pure fantasy," Taylor said in his opening remarks. "It is totally unaffordable with the resources the Department of Defense allocates to the Navy for ship construction." Both Taylor and Bartlett criticized the Navy for not requesting funding for three ships that have met cost and schedule goals and suggested that the Navy should reconsider the blueprint for its future fleet to make affordable programs the priority. Those ships include the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke Class destroyer, the T-AKE auxiliary dry cargo dock carrier and the LPD-17 amphibious warfare ship.

"The Navy will never get there [its 313-ship fleet] without either top line relief or a significant change in the mix of platforms," Bartlett told the panel. "The Navy's shipbuilding plan is based on the assumption that over the next 30 years the shipbuilding account will nearly triple in size. Do our witnesses really think this is realistic? How can you?"

Taylor, one of Congress' biggest shipbuilding advocates, Friday reiterated a proposal he has been floating to sharply reduce the number of DDG-1000 next-generation destroyers the Navy buys to procure instead a larger number of the less expensive DDG-51 destroyer. The Navy now plans to buy seven DDG-1000s, although lawmakers have been upset over the program's $3 billion-plus price tag. Northrop Grumman's Pascagoula Shipyard in Taylor's district builds both destroyers.

Bartlett estimated that the Navy could buy 14 of the older destroyers for the price of seven DDG-1000s. But Navy officials said the DDG-51 would cost more than half the price of the newer destroyers.

Taylor asked the Navy to report back in a month on the costs of any price changes in the DDG-51 program, for which Congress last appropriated procurement money in fiscal 2005. In response to a question from Taylor on Wednesday, Adm. Timothy Keating, who heads U.S. Pacific Command, said he would prefer to have five of the older destroyers at his disposal than two DDG-1000s.

"This proves to me that the Navy in Washington does not always listen to the Navy which operates the fleet," Taylor said Friday. After the hearing, Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, deputy chief of naval operations for resources and requirements, acknowledged after the hearing that "in a lot of areas of the world, capacity becomes a capability."

But McCullough stressed during the hearing that the DDG-1000 is far more capable than the DDG-51.