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SecNav: Navy needs a destroyer this year

Navy Secretary Donald Winter hopes that Congress funds a surface warship in this year’s budget, and while he’d prefer a third Zumwalt-class destroyer, he’d still be happy if lawmakers funded an older Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, Winter said Thursday.

The Navy has a major stake in keeping U.S. shipyards healthy, Winter told Navy Times, so they, in turn, are able to keep the employees and production gear in place to keep building warships.

“This is a very important part of our fleet and we have to be mindful of the need to continue to invest and to maintain the industrial base that supports that investment and production activity,” he said. “In many aspects, making certain that we have — I’ll just say, a destroyer — in the [fiscal 2009] budget is more important than whether that’s a DDG 1000 or a DDG 51. I want a surface combatant this year.”

Over the past spring and summer, different Navy officials have espoused different views of how many copies of what kinds of ships the Navy should build. The Navy initially asked Congress for a third DDG 1000, but skeptics on Capitol Hill balked at the Navy’s promises it could control shipbuilding costs and House lawmakers deleted the ship. Supporters in the Senate continued fighting for it.

Then Navy announced in July it didn’t want that ship, and would truncate the Zumwalt class after two copies and resume building DDG 51s. The Navy’s top requirements officer told lawmakers this was because the Zumwalts couldn’t carry surface-to-air missiles or fight submarines as effectively — an apparent reversal from more than a decade of planning, and despite protestations from defense contractors and their surrogates in Congress. When Senate lawmakers pressed for the Defense Department to get involved with acquiring the third ship, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a former secretary of the Navy, reassured them the Navy had been “directed” to pursue the third ship.

Winter said that “within the building,” meaning the Pentagon, the sea service has reached a consensus for what it wants this year — a surface warship — and what it will ask for as it plans for future years.

“Everybody’s got their own little impressions and beliefs and, ‘I’d rather this, I’d rather that,’ but in the end, I think we would be able to make good use of a DDG 1000. That is what is in the president’s budget request on the Hill right now, and I’m hopeful that we can get the political support to enable us to acquire an additional DDG 1000 in ’09.”

Just the same, Winter reiterated the Navy’s recent worries about the threat from anti-ship and ballistic missiles, which has become a common Big Navy theme as service officials have made the case for buying more Arleigh Burke-class destroyers with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system. So if Congress decides to support the production of DDG 51 components or long-lead items, that’s also helpful, Winter said.

“I want to make sure we maintain our options vis-a-vis the DDG 51-class ships. Getting or maintaining, if you will, some of the critical component production on those ships is very important — some of those components, if you stop producing them, and you wait awhile and then you want to restart, that can become a very painful process. We want to avoid that,” he said.

Winter spoke about shipbuilding issues as they relate to an article he wrote in this month’s issue of the U.S. Naval Institute magazine Proceedings, in which he makes the case that the Navy is useful not only to influence events on land, but also to maintain the world’s interdependent network of supply and trade. As economies become specialized and companies rely on their goods arriving ‘just in time,’ rather than maintaining large inventories, Winter said, it becomes all the more important that the Navy protect the international network of trade, almost all of which moves by sea.

A single attack somewhere in the system — which doesn’t even need to do actual damage — can cause billions of dollars’ worth of ripple effects, Winter warns, unless the U.S. and allied navies provide constant presence to protect against such shocks. Energy and insurance prices spiked precariously in 2004 after a failed attack on an oil platform in the Persian Gulf, he wrote, even though the attackers caused no actual damage.

“Just the threat of perturbation can be felt worldwide,” Winter told Navy Times. “You no longer even have to wait for a shipment to be delayed, you just respond to the news.” Since America relies heavily on foreign trade carried mostly by foreign-flagged ships, “We have no alternative but to make sure it’s all protected.”