Low end v. high end and fleet of tomorrow
February 4th, 2010 | Liberty Ships Washington leadership | Posted by Phil Ewing
Navy Undersecretary Bob Work pointed out this week that for the cost of one destroyer, you can get a whole Riverine Squadron. This is RivRon 2, in Iraq, in 2007 // Navy
Our high-end colleague Antonie Boessenkool has a must-read story about some of the remarks that Navy Undersecretary Bob Work has been making this week out in San Diego, on his views of the Navy’s future budget and strategy needs. Take this gem, for example:
“The bottom line is, the [irregular warfare] stuff doesn’t cost a lot,” Work said. “You can buy a riverine [naval boat] squadron for a lot cheaper than you can buy a DDG-51 [destroyer]. … If you look at the increasing capacity for irregular warfare that we’ve had since 2006, it’s very, very impressive.”
But the fight for budget dollars will get tougher in future years as the U.S. government turns its attention to deficit reduction, Work said. The worst-case scenario is that that could change the nature of the Navy fleet, but that’s at least a far-off possibility….
“The whole competitive dynamic in the naval competition for the last 100 years has been based on a dominant Navy, a global Navy,” he said. “And if we lose that … then regional powers could actually start to say, ‘OK, I’ll take you out. I’ll actually get into a competition with you.’ We don’t want to do that, so I think the debate will be, at what point do you have to say we just can’t keep a global Navy? We’re not there yet.”
And that’s not all — wait’ll you read the historical context Work gave for the Navy’s enduring shipbuilding woes:
“Quite frankly, the Department of the Navy lost its technical authority in the ’90s. We lost too many professionals and we didn’t have a disciplined requirements process. It became more a thing where you could hang as many requirements on a specific ship as you wanted rather than a disciplined process” involving tradeoffs in requirements.
“We lost the ability to tell when our programs were really in trouble, because we didn’t have the right [amount] of oversight,” he said. “We lost the expertise to say, ‘We’re now in trouble. How do we fix it?’
Check out the full story here.
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links for 2010-02-05 « Budget Insight Says:
February 5th, 2010 at 7:02 am[...] Low end v. high end and fleet of tomorrow “The bottom line is, the [irregular warfare] stuff doesn’t cost a lot,” Work said. “You can buy a riverine [naval boat] squadron for a lot cheaper than you can buy a DDG-51 [destroyer]. … If you look at the increasing capacity for irregular warfare that we’ve had since 2006, it’s very, very impressive.” [...]