White House Presses Army, Air Force To Help Pay For Larger Navy

WASHINGTON: The Army and Air Force are being tapped to take money from their budgets to help fund the ambitious Navy shipbuilding effort slated to kick off next year, a situation that has led to weeks of trade-offs within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget where the plan has sat since September.

The outline of the plan calls for at least 500 ships, including hundreds of unmanned vessels to be built over the next several decades. Early indications point to demands for more submarines, smaller warships, and a new class of small aircraft carriers that would in part replace some of the Nimitz supercarriers currently in the fleet. 

To get there, the Navy’s shipbuilding budget would have to increase by billions of dollars per year. Since the Navy has reached the limit of how many dollars it can wring out internally, the Pentagon is asking the other services to make sacrifices. 

Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite said last month he and then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who was fired Monday by President Trump, had a plan to fund the new fleet through a mix of Navy and Pentagon money. Esper has already indicated the shipbuilding account could grow from 11% of the Navy budget to 13%, a move that would push the account to roughly $27 billion. 

As it stands now, the House Appropriations defense subcommittee is recommending a $22 billion shipbuilding budget for 2021, while its Senate counterpart set a $21 billion topline. Conference negotiations are expected to begin in December. The administration’s request was $19.9 billion, making the higher number an impressive increase in Navy spending power.

Esper committed to “augment us and help us out,” Braithwaite said. It’s unclear how much money the Navy has been able to find internally, or how much the Army and Air Force are being asked to surrender.

The Office of Management and Budget “is actively working to make headroom under what are expected to be flat defense budgets in the coming years to begin implementing Battle Force 2045,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense budget expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “That creates a lot of winners and losers, and it’s not easy. You can imagine how the Army and Air Force leadership feel about it.”

Before his ouster on Monday, Esper was “committed to finding that number,” Eaglen said. 

On top of the Navy budget battle, two sources have said the Trump administration is strongly considering releasing a 2022 federal budget before the Jan. 20 inauguration of Joe Biden, a move meant to throw down markers for spending across the government that the new administration will be forced to publicly grapple with.

Even if that happens, Congress has shown little deference for the Trump administration’s budgets over the past four years, freely moving billions for more ground vehicles, helicopters, F-35s and ships. Despite complaints from the White House, President Trump has always signed off on the changes.

Esper’s surprise firing on Monday, along with several other top civilian Pentagon officials, may actually have little effect on the Navy plan however. 

The plan has been endorsed by National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, as he laid out in his pre-election tour of several shipyards where he called for more funding for the Navy, and big new technology bets like putting hypersonic missiles on destroyers.

That close attention to detail from O’Brien may also have slowed down the White House’s work on the Navy’s plan. 

“The NSC staff may have wanted to give an opportunity for O’Brian to go out and try to push politically motivated changes,” said Bryan Clark, who helped the DoD with the plan. “Because the Battle Force 2045 plan didn’t necessarily include the stuff O’Brien talked about — adding hypersonic weapons to every [destroyer] and buying more frigates.” A team from the Hudson Institute led by Clark developed one version of the new fleet, and helped wargame the options over the summer.

Esper and the Navy

There is some irony to the possibility that one of Esper’s greatest legacies may be a bigger, stronger, more adaptable Navy. For years, Navy officials privately grumbled that the secretary, a retired Army officer and former Army secretary, didn’t fully understand or appreciate seapower. 

His rejection of the Navy’s 355-ship plan earlier this year underscored some of that suspicion, as did his takeover of the planning for a new fleet. 

But with time quickly running out on the Trump administration, and Esper gone, the Navy “might have missed their window” to pitch the idea to Congress before the Biden team comes in with their own ideas Clark said. “I argue the window to do this sort of thing was in early November, once the study was complete, and they could have made this pitch and gone to the Hill” to build a constituency behind the plan.

It’s not at all clear that the incoming Biden administration would be much interested in making major changes to the plan, however. 

The expanding Chinese military might, in many ways centered around long-range missiles and a growing fleet is a bipartisan concern on Capitol Hill, and the presumptive Biden Defense Secretary, Michele Flournoy, has expressed a willingness to meet that challenge head on.

“We have to have enough of an edge, that first and foremost we can deter China from attacking or endangering our vital interests and our allies. That means resolve,” Flournoy told Defense News recently. 

Testifying before Congress in October 2019, she said one of the issues the Pentagon needs to weigh going forward is “what capabilities would US naval and air forces need to credibly threaten to sink 300 military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships within 72 hours? Such a capability would certainly pose a fundamental dilemma for any great power contemplating aggression.”

Some analysts see a degree of carryover in a Biden Pentagon at least when it comes to the shipbuilding plan, which directly addresses some major needs for the Navy.

“I think the major elements will continue, because those are driven by strategists — the unmanned ships, the emphasis on submarines, smaller combat and distributed operations,” said Mark Cancian, a senior advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former official at the Office of Management and Budget. “I think you’ll see that in a Biden administration the number of ships will change but I think the major elements will remain.”