Esper’s Fantasy Fleet – By John R. Kroger (Defense One) / Oct 13 2020
The SecDef’s 500-ship plan is an exercise in wishful thinking that avoids hard choices.
This past week, Defense Secretary Mark Esper began to share details of his new vision for the future of the Navy. His plan, with a name seemingly ripped from a videogame box – “Battle Force 2045” – calls for enlarging the fleet from 300 ships to roughly 500. For those of us who believe that sea power is important to national security, a robust call for a bigger Navy sounds great. As soon, however, as one begins to examine the details, it becomes clear that Esper’s plan is pure fantasy.
The single biggest flaw in what Esper has shared to date is his utter failure to explain how the nation and its Navy will pay for all those new vessels. The Navy can barely meet its financial obligations today, with a budget of just over $200 billion and a fleet of just under 300 ships. Even if Esper could achieve significant economies of scale, a two-thirds jump in fleet size might boost costs 40 or 50 percent, requiring an increase in the Navy’s annual budget of $80 billion to $100 billion. Construction costs to create a fleet of 355 ships, for example, let alone 500, would add almost $30 billion to the Navy’s shipbuilding budget and $38 billion to annual maintenance costs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Getting to 500, even if the ships are small and lightly crewed, would almost certainly add at least $20 billion, and probably much more. Today, no one on Capitol Hill, from either party, believes this kind of build-up is in the cards.
Yes, 500 ships are theoretically better than 300, and if I were told that cost was no object and asked to design the ideal fleet, I am sure I would propose 500 or 600 ships. But strategic planning is worthless unless it reflects financial reality. The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office currently projects that the federal budget deficit will explode to an unthinkable $3.7 trillion in fiscal year 2020. Given this fact, there is strong bipartisan consensus that Defense Department budgets will remain flat or decline over the next decade.
Continue to article> https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/10/espers-fantasy-fleet/169179/
