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U.S. Navy Shipbuilding Plan Skirts Decision on Trump’s Target for Now

U.S. Navy Shipbuilding Plan Skirts Decision on Trump’s Target for Now

The U.S. Navy’s new 30-year shipbuilding plan puts off a decision about whether to stick with the Trump administration’s target for a 355-vessel fleet until at least fiscal year 2024. 

After months of study and delay, a 28-page report to Congress released Wednesday includes a chart listing the 355-vessel goal and two other studies ranging to as many as 404 vessels based on various projections of budget growth, including no real growth. The Navy currently has 298 deployable ships and submarines.

“The Plan notes a new fleet assessment that will inform the fiscal 2024 budget” so the new document is “a reference point for now, but not a chart to navigate the long-term outlook for General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls and other shipbuilders and suppliers,” Byron Callan, managing director for Capital Alpha Partners LLC, said in an email.

Although the report summarizes already announced fiscal 2023 funding levels, it offers fresh clues on previously undisclosed spending for specific programs through fiscal 2027. That includes: $39 billion for the Virginia-class submarine program; $36 billion for the Columbia-class ICBM submarine; $22 billion for the DDG-51 Aegis Destroyer and $7.1 billion for the new FFG-62 Frigate.

“We wanted to lay out a floor,” for ship construction levels, including budget scenarios that projected no real growth, Jay Stefany, the Navy’s acting assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition, told reporters Wednesday. “But we also wanted to give Congress and industry a heads-up of where we would like to go were we to have more resources available and what we could actually build.” 

The new blueprint is “pretty solid” on the dollars available and the industrial base’s capacity for the next 10 years, and “at least gives goal posts” for years beyond that despite “a lot of unknowns,” he said.

But Congress may press the Navy on when it will release a new goal to replace the 355-ship plan set in 2016, Ron O’Rourke, a naval analyst with the Congressional Research Service, said in a report Wednesday.

“In the absence of an updated and clearly defined force-level goal reflecting the Biden administration’s national defense strategy,” O’Rourke said it would be difficult for Congress to assess plans for the Navy’s “future size and composition.”

Lawmakers would face the challenge of determining how many ships, and which types, will be needed “to adequately perform the Navy’s projected missions in coming years, particularly in light of great-power competition with China and Russia,” he said.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.