House panel: Navy could seek fleet funding help
By Philip Ewing - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Jan 21, 2010 6:00:55 EST

The Navy will never afford the fleet it wants, its new European ballistic missile defense mission and a new class of ballistic-missile subs, defense experts told a House panel Wednesday — but it could try to get other parts of the government to pay for them.

Two congressional shipbuilding experts and a high-profile defense analyst told the seapower subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee that a good strategy for the Navy might be to arrange for some of its big-ticket items to be funded elsewhere in the labyrinthine federal budget, rather than from the same pool of money the service gets each year to build ships.

The cost of designing and building a replacement for the Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine could vacuum up so much of the Navy’s regular shipbuilding budget — as much as half, according to one forecast — it could barely afford anything else by the middle of the century, observers worry.

In answering lawmakers’ questions, defense analyst Loren Thompson gave the example of how the U.S. buys nuclear weapons, which are funded by the Department of Energy, even though they’re actually fielded aboard Air Force bombers or Air Force and Navy missiles. The Navy could make a similar case that it needs separate, strategic funding for the estimated $85 billion it will cost to replace Ohio-class boomers, Thompson said, which would leave its main yearly shipbuilding account free to build the rest of the fleet.

“If (the submarine known as SSBN(X)) were funded as a separate priority, we’d probably get a better outcome,” he said. “If we were to do that, while leaving the planned shipbuilding budget at its current level, it would probably solve most of our forward shipbuilding problems.”


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2010/01/navy... /



unhappycamper comment: So the plan is to suck the economic life out of other parts of the US budget? Comeon Guys. You're already getting a trillion dollars a year for your toys and occupations. Enough.