SecNav Details Gaps Between Navy & Pentagon Shipbuilding Plans

PENTAGON: Frustrated with Pentagon-run war games that contributed to the Defense Secretary taking over the Navy’s shipbuilding plans, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly on Tuesday said be believes planners should not have added a phantom 12th aircraft carrier to the mix, an extra ship the Navy won’t have until the 2060s. 

“My view on that is, if we’re not ever really going to get to 12, why are we wargaming around 12,” Modly told two reporters in his office Tuesday. “Why are we not war gaming around what we most likely will have, and then figure out how we manage risk in those areas?”

The secretary raised the dilemma the Navy faces in adding one more carrier to its current fleet of 11 during a discussion about delays to the highly-anticipated 30-year shipbuilding and force structure plans, which Defense Secretary Mark Esper took control over last month, promising to finish his own version by July.

Esper received widespread bipartisan criticism this month from House and Senate lawmakers over the delay in submitting the plans, which Congress relies on to conduct their annual budget markup. As it stands now, the Navy will be without long-term plans until after both houses of Congress do much of the work to build the final 2021 budget over the coming months.

Modly said he “wasn’t really uncomfortable” with anything Esper’s staff proposed, but outlined a few concerns over how the Pentagon reviewed the Navy and Marine Corps’ efforts. 

The campaign analysis studies that Esper’s office conducted “did not pressure test that against the War College, and I know that they didn’t pressure test it through other types of war gaming scenarios,” Modly said. The Navy and Marine Corps spent months gaming out various force structure mixes both internally and at the Naval War College in order to produce not only the 30-year plan, but the Integrated Naval Force Structure Assessment. The Marine Corps also has a force structure study that it had considered ready to go but is now on hold.

Specifically, Modly said one of the differences between the two was the Pentagon became “very definitive about certain ship categories. I would have been comfortable with them giving a range — ‘we think it should be somewhere between this and this,’ — but that’s not the way they developed things.”

Modly’s comments are the most detailed account yet of what happened in February, when Esper surprised the Navy and Marines by telling them he was kicking off a new deep dive into the planning effort, and would wrap up around July. Several defense officials have confirmed the services were surprised by Esper’s move, and have bristled at their work being picked apart after having invested so much into the planning. 

The tension has been deepened by the cuts to its shipbuilding account the Navy was forced to take to help fund President Trump’s border wall and invest more in modernizing the nuclear enterprise, both of which have have forced hard choices in 2021 budget.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told the House Armed Services Committee recently that the $4 billion reduction in his shipbuilding account from last year “happened at budget endgame very quickly,” adding that Navy officials were informed of the changes “after the decision was made.”

The drama is playing out as the Navy tries to figure out a path to reaching the goal of a 355-ship fleet. The 2021 budget made that more difficult by slowing shipbuilding, and actually reducing the planned size of the fleet over the next five years. 

Esper has said he’s committed to getting to at least 355, and Modly has suggested 390 ships might be the right size, with dozens more unmanned ships coming on top of that. Of course, there are no indications the Navy will get the money to do that without redefining what a warship is or completely rejigging the Navy budget.

Those unbuilt unmanned vessels have emerged as one of the points of contention between the Navy and DoD. In testimony to Congress over the past week, Modly has said he doesn’t view the discrepancy as being all that big, especially considering the Navy is still working out the requirements for what those unmanned vessels of the future will look like, how they’ll operate, and what they’ll do in the fleet. 

In his office Tuesday, the secretary suggested the Navy was looking to add more unmanned ships than the Pentagon supported. “Maybe both of us are wrong, and maybe it’s twice as much as they think, or maybe it’s half of what we think, I don’t know the answer to that but we don’t we don’t even have the platform yet so we have to move down the path to develop it.”

One thing all parties have agreed on, according to the secretary, is the need for a new class of frigates.  

Modly said support for the frigate program has been “consistent in all the analysis that we’ve done, whether it’s us or it’s [Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation] office or others.” With that in mind he has tasked Navy acquisition chief James Geurts with moving up the date of an award for the program from this summer to possibly as early as late spring.

The competition to build 20 ships at a rate of two per year between 2021 to 2029 might also see another big change. Modly said he would also like to see yearly production of those ships to double from two to “three or maybe four of those a year.”

It’s not clear that the shipyards currently bidding for the frigate work could meet such expectations, but Modly has shown in the four months he has run the department that he’s willing to push for speed.

The frigate plan will likely be released before Esper wraps up his review of the Navy’s force structure, and before a new deep dive into the future of aircraft carriers is complete in the September time frame. Somewhere in there, the Navy will likely have a new secretary, as the Trump administration has recently nominated Kenneth Braithwaite as the next civilian head of the service. 

With all of these moving parts, the Navy’s path forward is unclear, even as planners start work on the fiscal 2022 budget. Modly said he recognized as much when he briefed Esper on the shipbuilding and force structure plans earlier this year. “I said ‘hey look, this is a starting point for us, this is not the end point,’” indicating he’s willing to make changes as ship totals and the force mix remains in flux.