US CNO: Navy Faces Shortfalls, Backlogs and Higher Risks

Shrunken but stable U.S. Defense Department budgets through fiscal 2015 allow the U.S. Navy an acceptable forward presence and have temporarily restored critical training and operations, but the force still faces shortfalls, backlogs and higher risks, the chief of naval operations said on Wednesday.

 
Navy Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert joined Navy Secretary Ray Mabus Jr. and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James F. Amos before the Senate Armed Services Committee to testify on the Navy’s fiscal year 2015 budget request.

“We operate forward to give the president the options to deal promptly with contingencies,” Greenert told the panel, directing their attention to small charts he gave them showing the global distribution of deployed ships, bases and support areas.

“Our efforts are focused in the Asia-Pacific, I think you can see that, and the Arabian Gulf,” Greenert said. “But we provide presence and we respond as needed in other theaters as well.”

“The 2014 budget will enable an acceptable forward presence. Through the remainder of the year we’ll be able to restore a lot of our fleet training and our maintenance and our operations, and we’ll recover a substantial part of the 2013 backlog that we’ve talked about quite a bit in this room,” Greenert told the senators.

“The president’s 2015 budget submission enables us to continue to execute these missions, but we’re going to face some high risk in specific missions articulated in the defense strategic guidance,” he added.

The CNO said the Navy’s fiscal guidance through the DOD five-year Future Year Defense Plan is about halfway between severe cuts required by the Budget Control Act caps, also known as sequestration, and the president’s fiscal 2014 plan. It’s still a net decrease of $31 billion when compared with the president’s fiscal 2014 plan.

To prepare the Navy’s program within those constraints, Greenert said, he set the following priorities and Mabus supported him.

• Provide a sea-based strategic deterrent;
•  Maintain a forward presence;
• Maintain the capability and capacity to win decisively;
• Maintain the readiness to support the above;
• Maintain and bring in asymmetric capabilities and maintain a technological edge; and
• Sustain a relevant industrial base.

“I’m troubled by the prospect of reverting to the Budget Control Act revised caps in 2016. That would lead to a Navy that is just too small and lacking the advanced capabilities needed to execute the missions that the nation expects of the Navy.”

Greenert said such a Navy would be unable to execute at least four of the 10 primary missions laid out in the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance and the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, and its ability to respond to contingencies would be dramatically reduced in that future scenario.

“Further, our modernization and our recapitalization would be dramatically reduced, and that threatens our readiness and our industrial base.”

If the nation is saddled with the full eight years of sequestration, Amos said, the Marine Corps will be reduced to 175,000 Marines.

In his remarks to the Senate panel, Mabus discussed the number of ships the Navy would end up with if sequestration moves ahead as planned.

“We would get to a 300-ship Navy by the end of this decade under the current plan, and we would keep it going forward,” the secretary said.

The decommissioning of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington would be an issue, Mabus said.

“Three destroyers, one submarine, four support ships, and one afloat forward-staging base that we are currently planning to build — we could not build at those levels,” He said.

One of the perverse things that happens with sequestration, Mabus said, is that as the Navy takes ships such as destroyers or submarines out of multiyear contracts.

In response to a question about whether there is an area he considers a special problem area, the secretary cited fair compensation for service members and what he called the unique characteristic that the Navy and Marine Corps give the nation: presence, which he defined as “the ability to be forward deployed, the ability to have the right number and the right mix of ships forward, the ability to maintain those ships, the ability to have trained crews on those ships.” That presence gives the nation options, he added.

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Press Release, March 14, 2014; Image: US DoD