
DATE: Wednesday, November 26, 1997          TAG: 9711250724

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SERIES: Future of the Fleet: part seven

        Last in a Series

SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 486 lines

FUTURE OF THE FLEET: WHAT LIES AHEAD?

In the early drawings the new ship looked more like a barge than a man-of-war. No guns studded its deck, no airplanes either - just a small pilot house faintly reminiscent of the turret atop the Monitor, the famed Union ironclad of the Civil War.

But its proponents in the Navy, from the chief of naval operations on down, thought their angular ``arsenal ship'' might change naval warfare as profoundly as aircraft carriers had during World War II.

Clustered beneath its long, flat deck would be 500 missile tubes - enough firepower to make the arsenal ship the most heavily armed vessel in history, and to make dreadnoughts of the past seem like mere gunboats. Its three-layered hull would enable it to keep fighting through hits from enemy missiles and mines. Its skin would be coated to absorb radar, and it would be able to ``ballast down'' to enable its deck to ride almost flush with the water - a combination, the Navy believed, that would make it difficult to find and all-but-impossible to sink.

Perhaps most revolutionary, the ship would be manned by just 20 sailors. Its eyes and ears would be on other ships or airplanes; their computers and radars were to fire and guide its missiles.

And for all its firepower, it would have been among the cheapest warships in the U.S. fleet: The prototype's cost was capped at $750 million, and production models were to cost about $500 million each, less than half the cost of a modern destroyer.

Critics said its heavy load of missiles would make it a fat target, and that its mission could be accomplished by other weapons the United States already owns. But its most enthusiastic boosters thought an arsenal ship positioned near a troublesome country such as Bosnia or Iraq might replace several of the destroyers and cruisers the Navy routinely assigns to such coasts.

Some even suggested quietly that by investing perhaps $3 billion in a fleet of four to six arsenal ships, the nation might be able to get along with one or two fewer aircraft carriers, ships that cost $5 billion each.

That was less than three years ago. Today, the arsenal ship is an idea in mothballs. The Navy scuttled the program in October, bowing to Congress' preference for established but pricier systems like the Arleigh Burke class of destroyers and a new attack submarine.

The service could have rearranged its budget to keep the ship alive, officials acknowledged. Instead, top admirals concluded that other priorities would not allow them to fit even a single arsenal ship into their long-range plans.

Navy officials say many of the ship's features may see life in a new generation of destroyers that will go into production after 2002. But some analysts worry that the arsenal ship's demise signals the fate awaiting other innovative ideas, as the service tries to fit an aggressive modernization program into a budget that at best will be frozen for the foreseeable future.

By the end of the next decade, the Navy plans to commission not only the first ship in a generation of destroyers, but newly designed submarines and amphibious transports, as well. It also wants to begin construction of a new generation of aircraft carriers and to begin flying a stealthy ``joint strike fighter'' designed in cooperation with the Marine Corps and Air Force.

The plans are easily the most expansive put forward by any of the military branches, but their affordability is questionable at best.

And the vision driving them - or lack thereof - is a subject of increasing debate among analysts, policymakers and members of Congress.

Short-term investing?

The skeptics range from such longtime Pentagon critics as Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers to such strong defense advocates as Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based think tank.

Bumpers, who this month took to the Senate floor to attack the Navy's retirement of submarines and cruisers that have a decade or more of remaining service life, complains the service is trying to do too much - and is using tax dollars to subsidize shipbuilders in the bargain.

The service is so eager for new ships, he argues, that it is willing to retire perfectly usable ones in which taxpayers have invested billions, like the nuclear-powered missile cruiser named for his state.

Krepinevich faults the Navy for not looking ahead far enough, sacrificing innovative ideas like the arsenal ship and a ``stealth battleship'' - an existing ballistic missile submarine that would be re-engineered to carry more than 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles - in favor of incremental improvements to established systems.

``I think they're overemphasizing the near term at the expense of the long term,'' Krepinevich said of the Navy's senior leaders. ``I think that's particularly risky when the long-term challenges might look very different from the ones we see today.''

While each of the new ships the Navy contemplates will be stuffed with state-of-the-art technology, all appear ``to be lineal descendants of the basic kinds of ships that we've had in the Navy for a long time,'' said Ronald O'Rourke, who follows Navy programs for the Congressional Research Service.

``I'm not saying that's wrong,'' O'Rourke added, ``but it could give some people the impression of a stovepipe investment strategy,'' in which the Navy's aircraft carrier advocates decide to build more carriers and submarine backers push more subs.

``I would want to make sure that we don't stumble absent-mindedly into an investment strategy that perpetuates a fleet architecture that may in fact not be appropriate for the 21st century,'' O'Rourke said.

Some independent planners, O'Rourke noted, have in the past suggested the Navy develop new kinds of major combatants. One such proposal was for a massive vessel that would serve as a sort of floating port and mother ship for a squad of small fighter ships. Outfitted with short-range missiles and machine guns, the speedy fighters would be designed for the kind of close-to-shore fighting the Navy expects to do during the 21st century.

Variants of the mother ship might be outfitted with attack helicopters and ``jump jets,'' which don't need the big deck of an aircraft carrier to take off and land, or be configured to carry large groups of Marines. Because the basic design would be the same, costs would be easier to control.

Many in the shipbuilding industry are pushing for another brand of new thinking - a greater reliance on corvettes and frigates, small ships suited to shallow-water combat. Though far less capable than today's destroyers, they could be built for a fraction of the cost, providing the Navy more overseas presence for its investment.

Corvettes also are in heavy demand among America's allies around the world, most of which can't afford to buy destroyers and cruisers. American investment in the ships would help U.S. shipbuilders, now operating on the thinnest of profit margins, market them overseas as well, said Si Nunn, a former executive vice president of the Shipbuilders Council of America.

But as the Navy reviews such proposals, it is already investing heavily in a weapons system that its proponents see as fundamental to naval strength, but which to others seems the embodiment of a strategy geared to the 20th century, rather than the 21st.

Since the Battle of Midway and the Doolittle raid of 1942 the aircraft carrier has served as the preeminent symbol of American military might. Its ability to respond quickly to crisis, to sidle up to hostile coasts and to project American air power inland has made it a formidable tool in settling disputes and, the Navy argues, preventing them. It can launch its air wing without concern for landing rights, and can keep doing so, day in and day out, for months.

``I tell my colleagues, `If you've never seen a carrier battle group in a foreign port, you'll never understand the power and might of the United States,' '' said Rep. Norman Sisisky, a Democrat who represents western Tidewater. ``The Navy is truly the power projection force. I think it stops wars.''

Critics suggest, however, that the carrier's greatest days are behind it.

They note that it puts 6,000 American lives in harm's way in a single hull, and that in the Persian Gulf and similarly constricted waters, a 100,000-ton warship a fifth of a mile long makes an inviting target.

Critics argue, too, that the weapons that could cripple it are cheap and easily had by America's rivals. They note that a flattop relies on a party of escorts to defend it - meaning that it is really part of a system of several ships - each breathtakingly expensive - without which it cannot deliver its planes to their targets.

The aircraft themselves are expensive - dozens of times more costly than evermore accurate standoff weapons like the Tomahawk. For all that, in some battles no more than half the carrier's planes are devoted to the projection of air power that defines the ship's mission.

George and Meredith Friedman, in ``The Future of War'' - the 1996 successor to their best-selling ``The Coming War With Japan'' - likened the carrier and its retinue to Goliath, his armor so heavy he required a shield-bearer; fearsome, but vulnerable to a nimble, lightly armed foe.

The carrier, they wrote, had become a ``senile'' weapons system, ``increasingly inefficient because of increasingly efficient threats.''

Writing in the July/August 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs, retired Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom castigated the ships as ``increasingly obsolete,'' the product of ``mid-20th-century technologies, heavily `product-improved' over the last four decades without overcoming their inherent limitations.''

Carriers are ``the most expensive way to deliver a bomb to a target,'' he wrote, twisting the knife with the observation that ``a much cheaper fleet of surface combatants could show the flag with the same effect. . . .''

Too many ships, too little money

Perhaps the most troubling of the carrier's weaknesses was identified in ``A New Navy for a New Era,'' a 1996 report in which Krepinevich argued that the cost of building and operating the ships threatens to sink the Navy's budget.

In addition to its $5 billion purchase price, a carrier can cost the Navy $2 billion or more a year to operate when its tactical aircraft and supporting ships are included.

During the 1980s, when then-Navy Secretary John Lehman was pushing for a 600-ship fleet, ship construction was so popular and the military budget so large that Congress once approved two carriers in a single year. In the mid-90s, with even a pared-down U.S. fleet able to dominate the globe, the entire budget for new ships has been hovering in the $4 billion to $7 billion range.

A carrier, in years when one is scheduled, can devour most of such a budget. In years like 1998, when no new carrier is planned, the money is enough to buy up to a half-dozen other ships. The Navy plans to use the appropriation this year for four destroyers and one attack submarine and to refuel the carrier Nimitz.

That kind of building might seem adequate, even generous: The world is enjoying relative peace and the Navy's superiority to potential foes is unquestioned. But if the service continues to buy at the rate of even six ships a year, and continues to maintain a fleet of around 330, those ships commissioned today will have to remain in service until 2052.

The Navy has no intention of keeping its ships that long. Most of its vessels are designed to last around 30 years, meaning the service must find a way to afford 10 or 11 new ships annually to maintain a fleet of 330.

A crunch is coming fast.

``The biggest problem with the fleet right now,'' Sisisky observed, ``is that it's not going to be big enough.''

The Navy's budget planners agree. The service's current six-year plan ``does not meet the long-term recapitalization requirements,'' according to a plan summary leaked last month to Defense Week, a defense industry newsletter.

``Navy forward presence and warfighting missions require a minimum of 300 ships,'' the document said. ``Even with extended service lives (overhauls that can lengthen a ship's life by a decade or more), procurement at an average level of six ships per year will not sustain a 300-ship Navy.''

Adm. Jay L. Johnson, a trim fighter pilot who currently leads the Navy, knows the math as well as anyone. ``We have to get up closer to 8 or 10 ships a year,'' he said in an interview at his Pentagon office.

``But I don't need to do that today,'' Johnson added, because the big investments of the 1980s left the Navy with a large and relatively young fleet.

Johnson makes no apologies for the Navy's continued devotion to carriers, noting that the Quadrennial Defense Review - a widely criticized self-assessment the Pentagon conducted last spring - reaffirmed the nation's need for 12 carriers and their battle groups.

``The core capabilities of the United States Navy still reside in 12 aircraft carrier battle groups and 12 amphibious ready groups,'' Johnson said.

The admiral could find plenty of uses in his upcoming budgets for the $5 billion it will cost to build CVN-77, the next scheduled carrier. But ``then I wouldn't have CVN-77,'' he said, ``and that's what I need the most.''

Johnson brushes aside arguments, like those made by retired Marine Gen. John J. Sheehan, that the Navy should save money by shrinking its carrier fleet and deploying the flattops only when there's a specific job to do.

With fewer carriers, the Navy would be unable to fulfill its responsibilities, Johnson said. The service could deploy the ships for longer periods or reduce its overseas presence, he acknowledged, but the former step would drive more sailors and officers into retirement, and the latter would leave America's worldwide interests inadequately protected.

``We've learned the things that work and the things that don't work,'' he said, recalling the days in the 1970s when carriers went to sea for eight months at a time rather than the current six. ``We tried it.

``Then we turned around and nobody was there to go back to sea with us.''

A budget balancing act

Johnson argues that the current pace of ship purchases balances the Navy's need to remain ready for today's threats and prepare for tomorrow's. And he insists the service is moving to change the way it operates to get more out of its limited construction funds and to generate more money for shipbuilding within its overall budget.

He is counting on some ``out-of-the-box thinking'' by the Navy, its shipbuilders and suppliers, plus at least one more round of base closings, to provide the cash he needs.

He's also trimming Navy manpower, the service's largest expense, by turning more jobs over to machines and computers and insisting that future ships be designed to operate with far smaller crews.

Johnson's reliance on base closings to generate cash will require the cooperation of Congress, which earlier this year emphatically refused to permit the move. And his insistence that manpower cuts and acquisition reforms will produce the billions of dollars each year that the Navy needs for additional shipbuilding is challenged by some analysts.

Base closings are ``an issue we're going to have to face again in the very near future,'' said U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who was one of a relative handful of senators to back Defense Secretary William S. Cohen's call earlier this year for additional closings.

``I recognize that we can't have it both ways,'' Warner said. ``We cannot keep in America a surplus of military installations and hope to have available dollars to modernize.''

Though Warner and fellow Virginian Charles S. Robb predict a majority in Congress ultimately will come around to that view, conversion seems unlikely before 2001, when President Clinton leaves office. A clear and bipartisan majority of lawmakers are unwilling to trust Clinton to preside over a new round of closings, citing his efforts to protect bases in California and Texas that were targeted for closure in a 1995 review.

The Pentagon's claims that the four rounds already conducted have produced savings substantial enough to justify a fifth or sixth round is also viewed skeptically. In a report last month, the General Accounting Office, Congress' fiscal watchdog agency, said the ``actual savings realized from base closure actions is uncertain.''

In early 1996, the report noted, the Navy said it would not begin to realize savings from the 1995 round of closings until after 2001; but by early this year, as its need for cash grew, the service projected that the 1995 closings would generate $1.3 billion during 1998 and '99 and $732 million per year after that.

Realistic, or wishful, thinking?

While Johnson is counting on more closings to generate some of the money the Navy needs for new ships, he called SC-21, the current designation of the Navy's next-generation destroyer, a ``classic example'' of what he's looking for to provide much of the rest.

That ship is to sail with a crew of fewer than 100, roughly one-third as many as today's destroyers. The Navy has told contractors that it can cost no more than $750 million per hull, but must have stealthy coatings and sophisticated sensors that will make it more survivable and more capable than the ships it will replace.

At about $30,000 annually per sailor, the manpower cuts Johnson envisions for the new ships will produce substantial savings. But even if the Navy could instantly cut an average of 200 sailors from the crews of 100 ships - a process that actually would take years - the annual savings would total only $600 million, less than the cost of just one SC-21.

Adding to the challenge is the reality that the Navy never has fielded a major weapons system that was both better and cheaper than its predecessor. Just the same, Johnson asserted that, ``I believe the industry will respond,'' in part because the Navy is prepared to give shipbuilders unprecedented freedom to build and outfit the destroyer and other new ships using materials and electronic systems available on the commercial market.

Where today's destroyers were designed and built with guidance from 3,000 pages of Navy-written specifications, the service plans to let builders work from less than a dozen pages of requirements for SC-21. Before it was canceled, the arsenal ship had just nine pages worth of specs.

Industry experts say such simplification can cleave building costs, but they're divided about how seriously the Navy is committed to building ships in such a dramatically different way.

The service's leaders have talked about using commercial specifications and standards in ship construction for decades, said Jim Colton, a Washington-based industry analyst. But when they build a new class of ships, ``it's always more complicated and more expensive than the preceding class.''

``You can build a helluva lot of ship for $750 million,'' said Nunn, the former Shipbuilders Council of America executive. One big reason Navy ships cost so much is that the officers assigned to oversee construction ``can never leave it alone'' and let builders to their work, he said.

The Navy is ``much more interested in the ownership costs, life-cycle costs. . . . than they ever were, particularly in manning,'' said William P. Fricks, president of Newport News Shipbuilding, the Navy's lone carrier-builder.

``All of that has an impact on us in how we design the ships and how we work with the Navy. We don't just now design the ship and give it to the Navy. The Navy is playing a much more integrated role on these integrated process teams, coming in and saying, `This is what we want,' and working on a daily basis on how to get there.''

Historically, a person would have to say there is no reason to believe'' that better ships can be produced more cheaply, said Michael Brown, senior vice president of AMI International, a naval consulting firm in Bremerton, Wash.

But after years of declining orders from the Navy and low-price competition from government-subsidized competitors overseas, U.S. shipbuilders ``are hard up against it'' and prepared to do whatever is necessary to cut costs, he asserted.

Even if that happens, Johnson has reason to worry. In a Pentagon-wide study earlier this year of acquisition reforms similar to the Navy's construction initiatives, the GAO cautioned military leaders about relying on such programs to generate substantial savings.

In 33 programs where the services claimed reforms were creating savings, the agency found costs actually had increased by 2 percent, mostly due to inflation and decisions by the military to trim the number of systems purchased.

``This suggests that the estimated cost reductions from acquisition reform are being offset by cost increases elsewhere in the programs or reinvested within the programs,'' GAO Associate Director David E. Cooper wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Cohen.

The wildly pricey blue yonder

If all the Navy's plans to bolster its shipbuilding program work as advertised and the service finds a way to afford 10 or 11 new ships each year, tomorrow's fleet may still be short of other critical equipment.

The service's budget for new aircraft, for example, is as pinched as its shipbuilding accounts. The Navy is struggling to buy the F/A-18 ``Super Hornet,'' an upgraded version of its current carrier workhorse, and a naval version of the joint strike fighter. With the Marine Corps, it's also investing in the V-22 Osprey, an innovative ``tilt-rotor'' plane that takes off like a helicopter, then rotates its props to fly conventionally. The Osprey will become the services' workhorse for ferrying Marines ashore.

Navy leaders tout the Super Hornet as a dramatic improvement over the models now in their inventory. It is 25 percent larger than the current plane, will fly farther and deliver more combat power with no discernible loss of performance, they promise.

But in a series of reports over the past two years, the GAO has branded the Super Hornet only slightly better than current F/A-18s, despite its much higher price tag - about $70 million per plane, vs. $58 million.

Franklin C. Spinney, a Defense Department analyst for tactical aircraft programs, argues that new fighters all the services have in the works may by themselves break the Pentagon's budget for new weapons.

For more than a decade, Spinney has been warning journalists, members of Congress and the Pentagon's military and civilian bosses of a ticking time bomb in weapons procurement, as the cost of new planes rises faster than military procurement budgets.

An essay Spinney circulated on Capitol Hill this summer lays out his case, using Air Force plans to buy F-22 ``Raptors'' and the new joint fighter after the turn of the century. The problems its sister service faces in affording those planes are equally applicable to the Navy's plans for the Super Hornet, the V-22, and its version of the joint fighter, Spinney said.

Last year, the Air Force planned to spend almost $67 billion on its two new planes between 2003 and 2012, Spinney wrote, purchasing 792 aircraft. That's a third as much money more than the $50.3 billion the service spent to purchase 1,800 jets during the peak fighter-buying years of the Cold War (1983-92). The money will buy 56 percent fewer planes, however.

If the administration and the Air Force leadership had decided the service could perform its mission with fewer planes, the higher costs would be burdensome but manageable. But because the service is keeping a force structure of 20 fighter wings, its inability to get more aircraft for its money means that it must retain more of its old fighters far longer than they were expected to fly.

The Air Force's own figures suggest that by 2006, the average fighter in the service's inventory will be just over 19 years old. And that average means that the oldest planes in service will be around 40.

``If the Army Air Force executed this plan to buy Spads in 1918,'' Spinney wrote, referring to a World War I biplane, ``the Air Force would have retired them in 1960.''

Ever-shrinking fleets

The problem was exacerbated by the Quadrennial Defense Review, in Spinney's reckoning. In an effort to save money, the review cut the Air Force's planned production rates for the F-22 and slowed development of the joint fighter.

Because the Air Force can't hope to keep planes for 40 years, just as the Navy can't keep ships for 50, the result of both service's policies will be steadily shrinking fleets of planes and ships, Spinney wrote.

The Navy already has had to turn to the Marine Corps to keep full complements of tactical aircraft on its carriers. Under an annual agreement begun in 1992, four Marine squadrons of F/A-18s and two squadrons of EA-6B radar jammers are assigned to carriers rather than land-based Marine units.

``We can expect mounting economic pressure to reduce force structure and/or combat readiness as older equipment becomes more expensive to maintain and operate and pressure to transfer money from operations to modernization increases,'' Spinney's essay concludes. ``We can expect that contractors will use these production cutbacks as an excuse to raise their prices. . . .

``Most importantly, we can expect morale to decrease as troops are forced to do more with less. We can expect professionalism to decline as our best people become disgusted and leave the service.''

As difficult as the Navy will find the execution of its modernization plan with current budgets, some of the service's staunchest friends in Congress worry that the actual amount of money available is more likely to shrink than to remain steady after the turn of the century.

A flat-line defense program ``is literally the best we can hope for,'' Warner said, because ``big wedges'' in the overall federal budget are coming as millions of Americans born during the post-World War II baby boom reach retirement age and begin collecting Social Security.

At the same time that's happening, the number of Americans paying into the Social Security trust fund will shrink dramatically, increasing the pressure to raise Social Security taxes or reduce other federal spending, including defense.

``We haven't yet hit the wall, so to speak, where I think the public is going to demand dramatic and disproportional and untenable reductions in defense spending, . . . '' Robb said.

But ``that's coming,'' he warned - and it's the biggest reason many in Congress are pushing all the services to mull tough choices about which programs they really need and really will be able to afford when the crunch comes.

``We should always be thinking about the way we use most everything,'' Robb said. Many in the Navy and the military in general are doing that, he added, but too often their efforts ``succumb to the forces of inertia.''

Warner argues that the President and colleagues on Capitol Hill should respond to budgetary constraints by giving naval forces a larger share of the overall defense budget.

``The Navy-Marine Corps team is the best equipped (force) to meet most of the initial threats'' posed by America's potential adversaries, Warner said.

Except for on the Korean peninsula, ``the likelihood of massive land warfare has diminished'' since the end of the Cold War, he asserted. Today the principal threat lies in rogue states and with terrorists that forward-deployed naval forces are more suited to handle than are stateside Army divisions and Air Force air wings.

Warner's Navy boosterism is not surprising, coming as it does from a former Navy secretary who now heads the Senate's Seapower Subcommittee and whose state is home to the world's largest naval base.

The Army and Air Force have similarly well-placed supporters of their own in Congress; each service has held its own in a series of reviews that during the past decade focused on whether any should get a larger share of defense dollars.

Indeed, even some of Warner's fellow supporters of naval power also worry about looming financial pressures on the other services.

``I don't like to disagree with my senior senator,'' Sisisky said, but ``I've been worried about the Army, as well as the Navy.

``I think we've cut it too much.''

ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

The carrier Theodore Roosevelt...

Photo by Martin Smith-Rodden

Adm. Jay L. Johnson, chief of naval operations

AP photo

Franklin C. Spinney, a Pentagon analyst...

Photos

Visions of the Navy, present and future

Graphic/VP