NSA O’Brien’s Latest Audible on Navy Plans: Calls For More Frigates, Faster

WASHINGTON: For the second time in a week, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien has suggested making major changes in Navy force structure, calls that have come while the Pentagon waits for the White House to release two Pentagon studies meant to chart the way forward for the fleet.

A week after surprising Navy officials by declaring the service would place experimental hypersonic missiles aboard all of its destroyers, O’Brien suggested Monday that the two Constellation-class frigates the service plans to buy per year aren’t nearly enough.

“We’re going to need two, three, four frigates built a year to get to the numbers of where we want to be,” O’Brien told employees at Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisc.. “This yard has the capability to build two or three of them itself.”

O’Brien’s visit to the shipyard came on the heels of similar visits by President Trump and Vice President Pence over the past year as the Trump administration has worked to retain its showing in a state the president won in 2016, but which now is a battleground state as polls suggest Joe Biden has the lead. 

The National Security Advisor’s trip to a tossup state in the waning days of the presidential campaign raised questions over his involvement in politics; NSC officials normally avoid campaigning. An NSC spokesperson emailed that O’Brien’s trip was meant to “underscore the importance of industry’s private shipyards in building and maintaining the fleet that our nation needs in an era of great power competition and the importance of working with partners and allies in cooperatively maintaining access to the global commons.” 

O’Brien also visited Oshkosh Defense in Oshkosh, Wisc., maker of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

President Trump visited the shipyard in June to tout its win in the frigate competition, which gives the yard guaranteed work on the first 10 ships, a much-needed boost for the facility that will see its work on building Littoral Combat Ships dry up in a few years. During that summer visit, Trump claimed credit for personally designing new Navy ships, a claim that left Navy officials scratching their heads.

The calls for more ships and new, expensive technologies to be placed on existing ships comes at a critical time for the Navy, after Pentagon leadership took control of its modernization plans earlier this year. 

In the weeks before the 2020 budget was released, Defense Secretary Mark Esper rejected the Navy’s modernization plan that would have gradually increased the size of the fleet to around 355 ships. After  scrapping the effort he directed his staff to redo it alongside the Navy, and added an outside team from the Hudson Institute to submit a plan to be war gamed, as well. Those new plans, finalized in the late summer, call for a 500-plus ship Navy with some 200 unmanned vessels. They were submitted to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget last month, where they remain. 

Both Navy and DoD leaders were prepared to roll out that Future Naval Force Study earlier this month, but those plans were scratched when the White House held on to the report, leaving the Pentagon in the dark as it begins work on its 2022 budget — the year some of these plans are meant to go into effect.

Congress is also waiting for the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan, eight months late and counting.

It’s unclear if O’Brien’s calls for hypersonic missiles to be installed on destroyers and building more frigates indicate the White House is trying to squeeze something new into the plans or is merely musing on what he would like to see. And with the Pentagon currently putting together it’s 2022 budget submission, its also unclear if O’Brien is inserting himself in those discussions by pushing for these projects.

The Pentagon is already pledging to push Navy shipbuilding budgets higher by billions of dollars a year, but that money will be cannibalized from other Navy accounts. There won’t be new money from the White House. 

In recent remarks previewing some of what will likely be in the force study sitting at the White House, Esper said the shipbuilding budget should grow from 11% to 13% of the Navy’s budget, pushing the account to roughly $24 billion. Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite later confirmed that Esper promised even more help if he found a way to get to that 13%, Esper “would then augment us and help us out…giving us additional [Pentagon] resources to be able to build ships.”

If the fleet is to grow, the Navy will need at least that much in its shipbuilding account. But the phantom study, and O’Brien seemingly adding new items to the punch list just days before a presidential election, are raising new questions over what the Trump administration’s vision for the future fleet might be.