USNI News:
CRYSTAL CITY, Va. — The Navy’s acquisition chief stressed the importance of modernizing ships in the fleet – particularly the ballistic missile defense (BMD) fleet – to keep them operating for their full service life, even as tight budgets are forcing the Navy not to upgrade five Aegis guided missile destroyers with a BMD capability over the next five years.
In a keynote speech on Wednesday at the American Society of Naval Engineers’ ASNE Day 2015, Sean Stackley said the only way to reach a 300-ship navy is by “ensuring the ships in our inventory today are mission-capable and relevant for their full service life.” He noted the Navy is midway through refueling the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSGN-726) and conducting refueling and complex overhauls of the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers (CVN-68), as well as being mostly through modernizing the amphibious dock landing ships.
“Perhaps most significantly, we’re on the front end of modernizing our Aegis cruisers and destroyers. Come what may in the budget environment, we need to complete this effort,” Stackley said.
USNI News reported Tuesday that five Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers (DDG-51) would forgo a combat system upgrade that would give the ships BMD capabilities. The plan saves the Navy $500 million over the next five years as sequestration’s budget caps threaten to return in Fiscal Year (FY) 2016, but takes away from the planned BMD-capable fleet that is increasingly in demand by the combatant commanders.
Modernization periods for five Flight IIA Burkes — USS Howard (DDG-83); USSMcCampbell (DDG-85); USS Mustin (DDG-89); USS Chafee (DDG-90); USS Bainbridge(DDG-96) — will not include the Baseline 9C Aegis Combat System series of processing power and software upgrades to bring an Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) capability to the destroyers, and would rather include only modest hull, mechanical and electrical upgrades, according to an unclassified version of the current modernization plan seen by USNI News.
Stackley would not comment on the specific hulls when asked during the question and answer session, saying that “the specifics of which hull, et cetera … when you start talking about FY ‘18 and out, what we’re doing is we’re putting a marker down in terms of what we need to do. But as everybody here is well aware, sometimes operations cause various ships to swap in and out of that plan. Most importantly, most importantly, and you hear this consistently, everybody that’s been up to the Hill has hammered the issue home – you hit us with sequestration, you take away our ability to deliver that capability.”
Even though these plans would reduce the Navy’s BMD-capable fleet by five ships, Stackley said that combatant commander demands indicate the fleet size needs to go up, not down…
