Prospects for Stepped-Up Sub Production Dim
SUBS
The New London Day
Renée Dudley
Boston University Washington News Service
April 25, 2007
WASHINGTON, April 25 —The “silent service” may be too silent for its own good, as the debate continues over increasing and speeding up production of the newest class of Navy submarines.
The dispute over advancing the 2012 target date for doubling the rate at which the new Virginia-class attack submarines are built involves questions of cost, parochialism within the Navy and, especially, the military role of the underwater fleet.
The usefulness of the American submarine fleet has been called into question at least in part because its missions remain almost wholly unknown to the public at large. They involve mainly intelligence gathering operations, defense experts say. But some analysts say that port surveillance via a periscope is not a good enough reason to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on an additional submarine each year.
Other defense experts say additional submarine procurement is absolutely vital to national security. But even while arguing for the importance of a strong and stealthy submarine fleet, they acknowledge that spending on the Iraq War renders quickened submarine procurement virtually impossible.
Currently, one Virginia-class submarine is being built each year, with production split in alternating years between shipyards in Groton and Newport News, Va.
The Navy had originally been scheduled to begin producing two Virginia-class submarines per year in 2002. President Bush’s most recent budget proposal calls for a second such submarine to be built each year starting in fiscal year 2012.
However, John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank, predicted that stepped-up production will be indefinitely stalled. “They’re going to be stuck at one a year for a while,” he said. “It’s a combination of competing priorities, plus nobody can explain what these submarines do. What subs do is all highly classified, so it’s hard to prove their usefulness. It’s just hard to describe their utility relative to other things at present.”
Pike added that although he does not expect production to move to two a year, he also does not expect it to dip below one a year.
“It’s the silent service, but their silence is not serving them at this point,” Pike said.
“When sealift people come in, they can tell you a story – they’ve got a whole song and dance they can give you about operational maneuvers on the sea.” By contrast, he said, “missions that submariners can discuss do not arouse a great deal of enthusiasm.”
During World War II and the Cold War, he said, submarines had definite missions that could be understood by the public– to sink enemy ships and protect the American surface fleet. “But when the Cold War ended, subs were relegated to the ‘nice to have’ category.”
Former Connecticut Rep. Rob Simmons, an ardent supporter of expanding the naval submarine fleet, disagreed, saying “national security is not about telling stories to the media.”
He continued: “People in the Navy, Pentagon, White House and Congress have security clearances, and just because you can’t talk about these issues in public doesn’t mean they’re not important or that they lack clearly defined missions.”
A lack of clearly understood objectives is not the only reason that additional Virginia-class procurement is likely to be stalled. Some defense analysts say that within the Navy itself the submarine fleet, the smallest division, is the lowest “caste”.
Some of these analysts argue that the underwater fleet is being sidelined by high-ranking surface warfare officers who prefer to steer federal funds to programs that will help their own division.
Chris Griffin, an Asia defense analyst for the conservative American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, warned that this could lead to a serious breach of national security.
Last November, for example, a Chinese Song-class submarine surfaced within five miles of the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier, an event, Griffin said, that surprised the defense community. “It is possible Chinese capabilities are greater than we expected,” he said. “There’s no indication the Chinese submarine threat is going to dissipate in the foreseeable future.”
Griffin said that in the Chinese navy the role of the submarine fleet is considered to be of the highest importance. In fact, he said, a submariner is on the senior military commission of the People’s Liberation Army.
In the U.S. Navy the surface fleet generally takes top priority, and submariners are underrepresented in the highest ranks of the Navy, which has not seen a submariner as Chief of Naval Operations in recent memory.
“It shows that submarines have pride of place when it comes to Chinese naval policy,” Griffin said. “And whoever has the strongest voice on policy has the strongest voice on procurement”
To Griffin, “it’s evident that it is in America’s interests to bolster sub capabilities.” He said the U.S. Navy should have learned “clear lessons” from history when confronting China’s “asymmetric” fleet. The 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, in which American surface warfare vessels were open targets for bombing by the Japanese, should have made it evident, he said, that “sub procurement shouldn’t be a debate, but a concern.”
But the Navy doesn’t carry all of the blame, said Loren Thompson, director of security studies at the conservative Lexington Institute. Congress made the decision to split production of the Virginia-class submarine between General Dynamics Corp.’s Electric Boat in Groton and Northrop Grumman Corp.’s Newport News facility.
In 1993, the Clinton administration attempted to have each facility concentrate on one type of submarine, but the Virginia congressional delegation argued that specialization would destroy competition. “If we [had] stuck with this plan,” Thompson said, “there wouldn’t be a problem” of cost.
The Virginia-class sub, originally designed to be a less-costly version of the Seawolf attack submarine, is becoming, in fact, more expensive than the Seawolf.
Congress and the Navy have put pressure on the shipbuilding industry to get down to the least-costly model possible. The Navy said it could fund two Virginia-class submarines a year in 2012 only if Electric Boat and the Newport News shipyard would be able to produce the vessels below a certain cost.
Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) said the debate over the split production process is “not productive to revisit that at this time,” even though it is proving to be costlier than production at a single shipyard. “Taxpayers should feel good that Electric Boat and the Virginia shipyard have been listening to the Navy’s demands” to keep costs down, he said, noting the importance of achieving economies of scale. But even greater economies of scale would result from the building of two Virginia-class subs a year, Courtney said in February.
Bob Hamilton, spokesman for Electric Boat, said increasing submarine production would make Groton’s workforce more efficient. At the current schedule of one Virginia-class submarine per year, Electric Boat actually delivers one submarine every other year, while Newport News delivers ships in the alternating years. “As a result, our staffing requirements vary by 500 to 1,500 people annually,” Hamilton said, noting that when production is increased, labor costs will decline and overhead costs will be spread over a larger business base.
Steven Kosiak, vice president for budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan policy research group, said the argument that producing two submarines a year would achieve economies of scale is sound, but not feasible for everyone. “You can make that argument with all kinds of programs, but you can’t make everyone produce at their maximum efficiency rate,” he said. “If you add money to one program to increase efficient production rate, you take it away from another.”
But the need for a bigger submarine fleet is urgent, some defense analysts say.
“Subs are going to be more survivable than any other warship in the fleet,” Thompson said, adding that most people would not consider him a strong submarine advocate. In today’s Navy, submarines are charged primarily with collecting intelligence and carrying out reconnaissance missions in the Persian Gulf, the eastern Mediterranean Sea and southeast and northeast Asia. “Intelligence-gathering is one of the ways subs will become more relevant in the future,” Thompson said. “The question is, where are we going to find the money?”
“We’ll need more in the future than we have now because it’s unclear if surface ships are going to be able to operate in places like China,” Thompson said. “Are we going to put aircraft carriers in the Taiwan Strait 20 years from now?” he questioned, noting that destroyers and aircraft carriers will more vulnerable than submarines. “The Navy has stopped thinking seriously about the future,” he said.
The United States, he cautioned, could soon face a serious national security shortfall.
“We’re headed for a [submarine] fleet of less than 50,” he said. “Half those boats won’t be available; they’ll be in repair, transit or training. That leaves you with about two dozen subs to cover the whole world, and that is not enough for defense in Europe or Asia.”
He added: “If we ever have to face another threat, we’ll have to go to underwater warfare–and we won’t have enough subs to do that.”
Courtney said that “at the pace we’re going, starting in 2015, the fleet is going to be inadequate to address our national security needs. It’s not a coincidence that the original plan to build two submarines a year starting in 2002 has been pushed back to 2012. Funding is being cannibalized because of the war in Iraq.”
The Defense Department ‘s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, a comprehensive examination of national security requirements, set as a specific goal the “return to a steady-state production rate of two attack submarines per year not later than 2012.” In addition, the Navy has said it needs a minimum of 48 submarines in its fleet. Unless submarine production is increased, it cannot maintain that number, given that some vessels will be decommissioned, while others will be in port for repair.
Thompson said that although he thinks the government is already spending too much money on the military, the Navy needs to procure two submarines a year starting in 2010 instead of 2012. “And to maintain a rational and efficient schedule, we’d build all boats at Electric Boat,” he said.
Harlan Ullman, a specialist at the Center for Naval Analysis and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said Congress will simply refuse to appropriate federal funds for two submarines a year because of ongoing costs incurred by the war in Iraq. “The Navy’s fiscal problem is the problem each of the services faces,” he said. “We have plans for 30 to 50 percent more stuff than we’re going to be able to buy, plus repairing the stuff that is being worn out in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Ullman warned that “unless Congress is prepared to spend more, you have an implosion coming, and there will have to be draconian cuts. “But in the past we have divided those cuts so each branch has suffered more or less the same.”
“In the case of China emerging as a potential threat, we have time to re-gear,” Ullman said. “People have to expect a huge compression inside the U.S. military, which could even mean going to one submarine yard.”
But Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces, disagreed, saying time is of the essence. “When a conflict starts, you don’t have any time – you have to do it in advance.”
Courtney added: “China is spending a lot of money on their military, and their Navy is getting most of it.” He said the Chinese Navy is building submarines at a rate of two-and-a-half a year. “Today we’re fine, but in 2015, who knows what the world’s going to be like?”
Advocates for accelerated procurement say that the existing underwater fleet is already overbooked with mission requests, even with a fleet that has what the Navy calls a number of vessels adequate for maintaining a moderate level of national security.
Former Rep. Simmons said that even with the current fleet of 54 fast attack submarines, the Navy still failed to fulfill nearly 40 percent of its top-priority missions. “It’s a serious national security issue,” he said. “The surface fleet was able to meet 100 percent of their requirements – yet more investments continue to be made in surface ships.”
The Navy denied hundreds of requests for intelligence collection last year because there were not enough vessels to fulfill the demands, Thompson said. “More than 300 days of intelligence collection were not served because they didn’t have enough subs that could go where they were requested,” he said.
But GlobalSecurity.org director Pike said this was not a good enough argument for increased procurement. “They talk about how they’re oversubscribed, but it’s easy to be oversubscribed when it’s a free commodity,” he said. “It’s trivially easy to churn out massive collection requests with no great effort.”
Pike added that he questions submarines’ effectiveness as information gatherers. “It’s less than evident to me that periscope depth is the best method for collecting intelligence,” he said. “If you took the money spent on subs and gave it to the intelligence community, would they turn around and spend it on subs? Probably not.”
Robert Work, vice president for strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said increasing production was not a question of capacity or requirements. “The only thing in debate is how soon you should move,” he said.
“There are significant congressional interests to do this and significant Navy desires not to do it,” Work said. “What comes out of the budget deliberations I rate as a coin toss.”
Although the House Armed Services Committee supports the advanced procurement of a second Virginia-class submarine, legislation must still be approved in the Senate. Seapower Subcommittee chairman Taylor said his Senate counterpart, Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has been a supporter of stepped-up procurement of the submarine.
Courtney said Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) have supported increased procurement before 2012.
In the House, Taylor’s subcommittee is scheduled to begin work on legislation the week of April 30. The full committee is expected to act in mid-June.
Both Taylor and Courtney express confidence that the House committee will approve the bill.
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