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
, 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.”
“350 ships or any number you choose is a bumper sticker,” agreed
, 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
, 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
and
them, or else you get a large but low-quality “hollow force.”
Crews must be
between deployments. Ships must be
, 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.
The Experts: Strategy & Budget
After the three ex-secretaries spoke, I sought comment from a wide array of sources in and out of government. What I learned: Speeding up shipbuilding is a lot harder than Lehman made it look. Smaller yards can build smaller ships or the less-complex components of bigger ones, freeing up the major yards for the hardest tasks. But there will still be chokepoints in production, particularly of nuclear-powered vessels, and we still need a strategy to make sure we buy the right ships.
“I do agree with the use of non-big five yards,” said
, a retired naval officer now with the
. “The only way to get going fast is to engage the entire industrial base.
“We are not yet close on the strategy, though,” Hendrix continued. “The Navy really hasn’t engaged in a true strategy review since the Maritime Strategy appeared during the Reagan administration, (and) we need a new comprehensive review of our naval strategy prior to really going full force into a large shipbuilding program.”
“Secretary O’Keefe got it exactly right,” agreed
, a retired Navy officer now with the
. “The administration has not made the case for a larger Navy than we have today, though that case is eminently makeable.”
“I think there was some serious hand-waving by all three panelists (about how) the industrial base could flex to meet the requirements of the larger Navy,” McGrath went on. Lehman’s comparison to World War II is particularly misleading, he said. Not only did the US of 1941 have a vastly larger commercial shipbuilding industry, those commercial shipbuilders could convert to military production relatively easily because warships of the time were much less complex.
“Smaller yards can do
or the LCS,” a congressional staffer told me. “The real bottlenecks…are submarines and carriers. We cannot easily, quickly, or cheaply certify another yard to build these ships, so I think that is a non-starter.”
Ultimately, the real limiting factor is simply money, the staffer said: “This is far and away more about
than anything else.”
