Boeing photo

Boeing MQ-25 Stingray prototype, an unmanned aerial refueling tanker

WASHINGTON: The chairman of the House Seapower Committee, Rep. Joe Courtney, came out forcefully today in favor of the Navy receiving a larger slice of the 2022 defense budget than the other services. The Connecticut Democrat adds another powerful voice to a growing chorus of lawmakers and military officials pushing for a bigger shipbuilding budget, possibly at the expense of ground forces.

Speaking at an event sponsored by an amphibious warship lobbying organization, Courtney said the traditional one-third breakdown between the Army, Navy, and Air Force budgets doesn’t match the reality of the current global competition, which is increasingly focused on the Pacific

“The ground force component of our military…its mission right now is just not even close to what’s happening with the heel-to-toe deployments of our Navy and Air Force,” he said. “Frankly, the tragedy of the collisions that took place a number of years ago was really kind of a symptom of the fact that deployments and the tempo was accelerating in a way that our readiness system and our training system was really not keeping up.”

The coming debate over budget share kicked off late last year when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley predicted there would be “bloodletting” at the Pentagon this year when it came to divvying up dollars in a year where the defense top-line is expected to remain flat with the 2021 budget.

In a memo leaked late last month, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks listed the 2022 shipbuilding plan as the highest priority on her list of items to tackle in the upcoming budget, signaling the premium the Biden administration is placing on modernizing the Navy — and finding a way to pay for it. 

In the last days of the Trump Administration, it released an ambitious budget outline that called for building a 500-ship battle fleet by pumping r roughly $167 billion to be pumped into the Navy’s account over the next five years, starting with a $27 billion shipbuilding budget in 2022. Last month, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday told Breaking Defense that plan would remain a guideline for how the service pitches its priorities to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

“What we’re doing is presenting the approach that we had under the previous administration that produced DoD’s budget submission a few months ago,” Gilday said. “We’re laying out all the analysis that went into that.”

Gilday doesn’t have the final say on that however. The budget proposals are still being passed back and forth between the White House and Pentagon, and it is expected to be released in early May.

Courtney’s comments on the budget came a few hours after he chaired a hearing in which Navy officials tried to sell their new plan for building hundreds of new unmanned ships, aircraft, and undersea systems to the House’s Seapower subcommittee.

The unmanned plan received tentative backing from lawmakers, mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The Navy has said it needs to be ambitious in its effort to build hundreds of new unmanned platforms in the coming years to better disperse its forces to meet the challenge of a growing Chinese fleet, which has already matched the size of the US fleet — although many individual Chinese vessels are relatively small and short-ranged by US-standards — and is only growing larger.

That effort is being met with come concern on Capitol Hill, however, which has had a front row seat to a string of costly missteps in recent years where the Navy has struggled to successfully build new classes of ships on time and on budget.

“As we head down this new road which includes larger and more complex technology,” Courtney said, “I believe we must incorporate the lessons learned from acquisition challenges like the Littoral Combat Ship and DDG-1000 to avoid costly, repeated mistakes.”

Rep. Elaine Luria, a retired Navy officer who represents a Navy-heavy district in southern Virginia, told Jay Stefany, the Navy’s top (acting) acquisition official, and Vice Adm. James Kilby, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfighting Requirements, that when she read the Unmanned Campaign Framework released this week, she was “really disappointed in what I saw, the lack of substance in the plan I thought it was full of buzzwords and platitude, but really short on details.” 

The congresswoman added that “with the recent acquisition failures on the last several ship classes, those of us on this committee are skeptical of the Navy’s ability to shepherd this new technology into employable assets that contribute to the lethality of those forces.”

Kilby responded that the classified version of the plan included more details, adding that the project is a work in progress. “We’ll update this annually as we move forward and not wait to get to perfect.” He said the Navy wanted to “give a document to the fleet that they can use in our exercises and we can test ourselves…I would expect an annual update on that for the foreseeable future.”

Stefany added that the “pacer for us now is China. So we need to watch what China’s doing and if we need to make an adjustment to our force design, we need to do it.”