James G. Zumwalt

If you do not normally have access to Senate committee reports, Information Dissemination site has done you a favor with its recent post on the status of the US Navy’s  future surface combatant...

> For the full post, click here: 

http://www.informationdissemination.net/2009/07/notes-from-sasc-report.html

> From the Senate report:  “...the committee recommends a provision that would prevent the Navy from obligating any funds for building surface combatants after 2011 until the Navy conducts particular analyses, and completes certain tasks that should be required at the beginning of major defense acquisition programs (MDAP).

For at least the past couple of years, the Navy's strategy for modernizing the major surface combatants in the fleet has been in upheaval. The Navy was adamant that the next generation cruiser had to begin construction in the 2011-2012 timeframe. After 15 years of consistent, unequivocal support of the uniformed Navy for the fire support requirement, and for the DDG-1000 destroyer that was intended to meet that requirement (i.e., gun fire support for Marine Corps or Army forces ashore), the Navy leadership, in the middle of last year, decided that they should truncate the DDG-1000 destroyer program and buy DDG-51 destroyers instead.

The Defense Department has announced that the Navy will complete construction of the three DDG-1000 vessels and will build three DDG-51 destroyers, one in fiscal year 2010 and two in fiscal year 2011. Beyond that, the plan is less well defined, and includes building only a notional `future surface combatant,' with requirements, capabilities, and costs to be determined.

Notwithstanding Navy protests to the contrary, this was mainly due to the Navy's affordability concerns. The committee notes with no little irony that this sudden change of heart on the DDG-1000 program is at odds with its own consistent testimony that `stability' in the shipbuilding programs is fundamental to controlling costs and protecting the industrial base.

The Navy claims the change of heart on the DDG-1000 program was related to an emerging need for additional missile defense capability that would be provided by DDG-51s and is being requested by the combatant commanders, and would be used to protect carrier battle groups against new threats.

The committee certainly believes that the services should have the ability to change course as the long-term situation dictates. However, since we are talking about the long-term and hundreds of billions of dollars of development and production costs for MDAPs, the committee believes that the Defense Department should exercise greater rigor in making sure such course corrections are made with full understanding of the alternatives and the implications of such decisions, rather than relying on inputs from a handful of individuals. The committee has only to look at the decision-making behind the major course correction in Navy shipbuilding that yielded the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) to be concerned by that prospect.”

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