An unmanned underwater vessel (UUV) operates near the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf. (File)
WASHINGTON: The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office last week published its annual assessment of the Navy’s long-range shipbuilding plan, estimating the service’s current budget overshoots traditional congressional appropriations by as much as 43% in some cases — and providing a third-party analysis on how much a “distributed fleet” may cost.
“CBO estimates that the force envisioned in the 2022 plan would cost an average of between $25.3 billion and $32.7 billion per year in 2021 dollars,” says the new CBO report published Sept. 16. “Those amounts are 10 percent to 43 percent higher than the $22.9 billion the Congress has appropriated, on average, for all shipbuilding activities over the past five years.”
Those price tags are what the office says it will take for the Navy to field a fleet with dozens of new unmanned vessels alongside the traditional warships the service has built for decades. The Navy says that vastly expanded fleet of smaller and unmanned vessels are essential for Distributed Maritime Operations.
“Under the 2022 plan, the Navy envisions a force of between 77 and 140 unmanned vessels — 18 to 51 unmanned undersea vessels and 59 to 89 unmanned surface vessels,” CBO wrote.
CBO is mandated by law to provide independent estimates of the Navy’s long-term shipbuilding plans each year. The office issued an assessment of the service’s fiscal year 2021 plans in December, several months later than usual due to the Trump administration’s delays in providing lawmakers with the shipbuilding plan.
That analysis, the first to factor in the Navy’s ambitious goals spun out of the 2020 integrated naval force structure assessment, tagged the administration’s plans just slightly higher than the analysis published last week. Although the 2022 shipbuilding plan was published by the Biden administration, budget submissions following elections are usually influenced by both administrations as a matter of practicality and the time investment necessary for producing it.
The new report pegs new-ship construction between $23.4 billion and $30.6 billion per year, putting them between 15% and 50% higher than the funds Congress has provided over the past five years.
“Because the Navy’s plan does not include a specific procurement schedule, those projections are a steady-state estimate of the cost of building the platforms anticipated in the 2022 plan,” CBO wrote.
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