Navy chief warns against diversion of destroyer funds

Chief of Naval Operations Gary Roughead Tuesday warned against using the Navy's DDG-1000 destroyer as a "cash cow" to pay for other ships, arguing that doing so would affect combat capabilities and inject instability into the service's surface combatant modernization plans. Roughead said surface combatants are the part of his shipbuilding portfolio that cause him the most concern and stressed that he needs long-term stability to ultimately drive down program costs.

"One area that we're unsettled is in our combatant line," Roughead said. "To disrupt that, I think, would be very harmful to our future combatant programs and to our war-fighting capability."

The Navy has been trying to shield the DDG-1000 program from potential cuts on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have long criticized the program's $3 billion-plus price tag. Last week, Navy Capt. Jim Syring, manager of the controversial DDG-1000 program, argued that the proposed destroyer will provide capabilities that no other warship can offer and will ultimately be a "great value for the capability."

Tuesday, Roughead said he will continue to work with lawmakers skeptical of the next-generation destroyer in the hopes of building a "good, stable program."

Even the Navy's most vocal congressional supporters are looking at cuts to the DDG-1000 program, potentially making Roughead's efforts to keep the program intact all the more challenging. House Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor, D-Miss., has been floating a proposal to cut purchases of the destroyer from seven ships to two and instead buy more of the older but less expensive DDG-51 destroyers.

Both ships are built at Northrop Grumman's Pascagoula shipyard in Taylor's district. Syring said that costs on the DDG-1000 program eventually will decrease, with the fifth destroyer expected to cost $2.3 billion. An improved model of the DDG-51s would cost $2.1 billion, Syring estimated.

Meanwhile, Roughead expressed reservations about relying more on nuclear power for ships, saying that it is "something we really have to go into with our eyes wide open."

Last year, Taylor inserted language in the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill requiring the Navy to make its CG(X) cruiser nuclear-powered and he has indicated that he may expand that effort to other ships in an effort to save long-term fuel costs. The Navy has bristled at the up-front costs of nuclear power, which are estimated at between $600 million and $800 million per ship.

"We have to look at the total cost of what we're doing," Roughead said. "It's not just the fuel cost and what we would try to avoid in the 30 or 40 years of a ship's life. They are much more expensive to build; they are much more expensive to maintain." In addition, nuclear-powered ships require a skilled workforce and could drive up personnel costs, Roughead said.

But the four-star admiral acknowledged that future operations may require the Navy to go long stretches at sea between refueling. "The weapons of 20, 30 years from now, I think, will be very different than the weapons of today and they're going to likely require significant amounts of power," he said. "How do you generate that power and not be reliant on having to refuel every two or three days? There are reasons beyond just cost for us to be considering nuclear power."