Monday, March 28, 2016

Navy wants to mothball Tico Cruisers to fund new ships

Navy Matters: Idled Cruiser Update
The Navy has been trying for several years, now, to early retire the Ticonderoga class Aegis cruisers. Presumably, the reason is to eliminate any potential competition with the Flt III Burkes that might threaten their funding. Ironically, the Spruance class destroyers were retired and sunk to eliminate them as competition with the Ticonderogas! The wheel turns full circle, I guess.

Randy Forbes: Navy Has ‘No Credibility’ On Cruisers « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news, analysis and commentary

WASHINGTON: The cruiser war continues. With House seapower subcommittee chairman Randy Forbes declaring the Navy has “no credibility” when they promise to modernize aging Ticonderoga-class cruisers, House Republicans and Navy leaders are accelerating towards a public collision.

“They really don’t want to do the modernization,” Forbes told me. “What the Navy really wants to do is what they did from day one: They want to take seven of these cruisers out of commission and destroy them.” When Congress rejected that proposal, he said, “then they came back with this Disney type of fairy tale[:] ‘What we meant to say is we don’t want to kill them, we just want to put them in a deep sleep.'”

Forbes thought the Navy’s 11-year modernization plan was a backdoor attempt to decommission the ships. He thinks the current four years-per-ship plan is still too slow and leaves the Navy too much room to slow-roll Congress. That’s why he wants the acceleration to two years per ship: It will force the Navy to get started.

The Navy argues that going from four years to two doesn’t give the shipyards enough leeway to manage their workflow, resulting in lower efficiency and higher costs. Forbes doesn’t agree and says the shipyards don’t either: “The shipyards are not buying what they’re trying to sell there,” he told me, “[but] they [the Navy] right now are putting pressure on these yards not to say what they can do with these cruisers.” If the Navy opens the bidding to yards on both coasts, there should be someone somewhere who can do it efficiently and inexpensively.

“If you want to just do away with the cruisers, we will save money,” Forbes said. “But strategically you pay an enormous price.”
Information Dissemination: What to Do With Those 11 Cruisers
 Speculation on the fate of the 11 Ticonderoga class guided missile cruisers that have been slated for “reduced operating status” in response to budget shortfalls continues to mount.  The plan would seem to involve long periods of inactivity in virtual “mothball” status for the ships as facilities and funding become available for modernization work. The age and hard use of the CG 47 class cruisers (the newest was commissioned in 1994) have raised questions on whether the class can continue on much past its estimated 35-year life span. Some experts have raised doubts as to whether a 1980’s era ship designed in the 1970’s can or should be part of the Navy’s front line defense against ballistic and cruise missiles in the 2040’s. The U.S. Navy would appear to have chosen to keep a minimum of 11 ships constantly in commission for the next 20+ years. There is still time however for the Navy to “hedge its bets” by partially preserving some of the Ticonderoga’s in a non-deploying reserve condition in the hope that future funding for a cruiser replacement becomes available. Mr. Putin’s recent shenanigans aside, the drawdown in ground wars in Southwest Asia, and mounting concern over Chinese intentions in the Indo-Pacific basin may yet convince lawmakers to fund large, dedicated air defense ships like the cancelled CG(X) class as a replacement for the aging Tico’s. They have performed in a magnificent manner in both the Cold War and the period of violent peace that followed, but they should not be expected to shoulder on to 50 years of active service.

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