Ships take a long time to turn around. But they take even longer to build — and that affects the federal budget.
This Saturday, the Ingalls shipyard launched its first destroyer in almost four years, the future USS John Finn. The time-lapse video above compresses the launch into 47 seconds, but it’s 17 months since the keel was laid down in November 2013. The destroyer was officially ordered two and half years before that, in June 2011, and it was funded in the fiscal 2010 budget, which was proposed in 2009. The year before, the Navy had decided to truncate production of the high-tech, high-cost DDG-1000 Zumwalt class at only three destroyers and restart production of the workhorse DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class, beginning with the Finn.
Launch of the future USS Finn
As a result of that decision, a class of destroyers first procured in 1985 will stay in service until 2072. And that’s not particularly long-term by Navy standards: The Ford-class aircraft carriers, the first of which is still under construction, are expected to stay in service until 2110.
So budget decisions made today will have consequences felt for years and decades to come. That’s why Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has pledged repeatedly that “I’m gonna protect shipbuilding until the last dog dies.”
When you cut the shipbuilding budget, Mabus told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 10th, “you see the effects today on….our shipyards. You’ll see the effects on our fleet ten years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now.”
Conversely, we’re paying now for decisions made 10-20 years ago. When House appropriators asked Mabus about longstanding shortfalls in Navy counter-drug patrols, he immediately replied, “that is one of the best examples of what happens when you don’t build enough ships.”
“We had frigates that were performing this mission,” Mabus explained. “Those [Perry-class] frigates were built in the late 70s, early 80s, they reached the end of their life, we’re retiring the last of those frigates this year. The follow-ons to those frigates are mainly the fast frigate and Littoral Combat Ships, but we didn’t start building them soon enough, so there’s a gap.”
The moral, as Mabus told Senate appropriators, is that “if you miss a year building a Navy ship, you never make it up.”
“We are dealing today with decisions made 10, 15 years ago in terms of what ships to build, and for that reason… I’m going to do my utmost to protect shipbuilding,” Mabus told SAC-D. “Having said that, as you protect shipbuilding, as you protect those numbers to have that properly sized fleet, other things begin to break”: readiness, deployment cycles, morale.
Congress is currently wrestling with the 2016 budget and the return of sequestration. It’s worth remembering that the full effects of their decisions this year may not be felt until 2026, 2031, or beyond.
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