Navy photo

The future USS Ford is christened at Newport News shipyard.

PENTAGON: Defense Secretary Mark Esper has put a stop to the the expected release of the Navy’s long-term force structure plan, telling the service on Monday to hold off and take another look, several sources confirm.

The plan, announced last year and slated to be wrapped up by Jan. 15, has run into serious headwinds. The Navy insists it can grow the fleet to 355 ships as early as 2030 despite its shipbuilding budget being cut in the recently released 2021 budget, and as  officials concede there’s little hope of significant growth in the near-term. Now Esper, who has been reviewing the plan for the past two weeks, is unwilling to sign off on it.

“The secretary is currently looking at that plan,” a senior defense official confirmed Tuesday. Since taking over the department in July, this is his first opportunity to influence a budget, and “he’s taking time to review things.” 

Another official confirmed that during the Monday meeting, Esper told the Navy the plan isn’t ready to be released. It is now unclear when it will see the light of day. A separate, but complimentary, Marine Corps plan to reform its own force mix was expected to be released this month, but that also appears to be on hold.  

The halt was initially reported by USNI Tuesday afternoon, and confirmed independently by Breaking Defense

The plan will kick in on the 2022 budget submission. 

The request for 2021, however, has already come under significant fire from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and was labeled “dead on arrival” by Rep. Joe Courtney, chair of the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces sub-committee.

The proposal calls for a $4 billion reduction from last year’s shipbuilding budget, and asks Congress for $3 billion less overall from 2020, part of an overall reduction of 11 ships the Navy had planned to buy by 2025. 

Speaking to a group of shipbuilders earlier this month, Rep. Mike Gallagher, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said “Congress can’t want a bigger and stronger fleet more than the Navy and Marine Corps want a bigger and stronger fleet,” adding “there’s a lot of confusion about the budget,” on the Hill, as the Navy proposes cutting budgets and ships while promising to grow.  

President Trump campaigned on building a 355 ship fleet in 2016, but under the administration’s current plan, which includes early ship retirements and cuts to previously planned submarine and destroyer builds, the Navy would only have 305 ships by 2025, 50 short of the 355 goal by 2030. That would make it a smaller fleet than the 317 ships projected by 2025 in Obama administration’s 30-year shipbuilding plan released in 2016.

The Office of Management and Budget ordered the Navy to consider counting unmanned ships as traditional ships late last year in order to help them along the path of reaching 355, but Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday have said their plan would have 355 manned ships, “plus” a number of unmanned vessels.

The two officials will appear before the House Armed Service Committee Thursday morning in what is expected to be a heated meeting with lawmakers clearly frustrated with the service’s inability to come up with a plan for the future.

In a bid to scrape up more money to pump into new hulls, Modly kicked off a “Stem to Stern” review of the entire force this month to find $40 billion in savings over the next five years, by eliminating commands, slashing logistics costs, and cutting or outsourcing back-end functions.