By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, March 12, 2014 – Shrunken but stable Defense
Department budgets through fiscal 2015 allow the Navy an acceptable forward
presence and have temporarily restored critical training and operations, but
the force still faces shortfalls, backlogs and higher risks, the chief of naval
operations said today.
Navy Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert joined Navy Secretary Ray
Mabus Jr. and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James F. Amos before the Senate
Armed Services Committee to testify on the Navy’s fiscal year 2015 budget
request.
“Forward presence is our mandate. We operate forward to give
the president the options to deal promptly with contingencies,” Greenert told
the panel, directing their attention to small charts he gave them showing the
global distribution of deployed ships, bases and support areas.
“Our efforts are focused in the Asia-Pacific, I think you
can see that, and the Arabian Gulf,” Greenert said. “But we provide presence
and we respond as needed in other theaters as well.”
Over the past year, the Navy influenced and shaped the
decisions of leaders in the Arabian Gulf, Northeast Asia and the Levant, and
patrolled off the shores of Libya, Egypt and Sudan to protect American
interests, he added.
With the Marine Corps, the Navy relieved suffering and
provided assistance in the Philippines in the wake of typhoon Haiyan last
November, dissuaded coercion against U.S. allies and friends in the East and
South China seas, the admiral said, kept piracy at bay in the Horn of Africa
and continues to support operations in Afghanistan.
“The 2014 budget will enable an acceptable forward presence.
Through the remainder of the year we'll be able to restore a lot of our fleet
training and our maintenance and our operations, and we'll recover a
substantial part of the 2013 backlog that we’ve talked about quite a bit in
this room,” Greenert told the senators.
“The president's 2015 budget submission enables us to
continue to execute these missions, but we're going to face some high risk in
specific missions articulated in the defense strategic guidance,” he added.
The CNO said the Navy’s fiscal guidance through the DOD
five-year Future Year Defense Plan is about halfway between severe cuts
required by the Budget Control Act caps, also known as sequestration, and the
president’s fiscal 2014 plan. It’s still a net decrease of $31 billion when
compared with the president’s fiscal 2014 plan.
To prepare the Navy’s program within those constraints,
Greenert said, he set the following priorities and Mabus supported him.
-- Provide a sea-based strategic deterrent;
-- Maintain a forward presence;
-- Maintain the capability and capacity to win decisively;
-- Maintain the readiness to support the above;
-- Maintain and bring in asymmetric capabilities and
maintain a technological edge; and
-- Sustain a relevant industrial base.
“Using these priorities, we built a balanced portfolio of
capabilities within the fiscal guidance we were provided,” the admiral said.
“We continue to maximize our presence in the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East,
using innovative combinations of rotational forward-based rotational forces,
forward basing and forward-stationed forces.”
The Navy still faces shortfalls in support ashore and a
backlog in facilities maintenance that erode the ability of its bases to
support the fleet, he said, and has slowed modernization in areas that are
central to staying ahead of or keeping pace with technologically advanced
adversaries.
As a result, “we face higher risk if confronted with a
high-tech adversary or if we attempt to conduct more than one multiphase major
contingency simultaneously,” he added.
“As I testified before you in September,” he told the
committee chairman, “I'm troubled by the prospect of reverting to the Budget
Control Act revised caps in 2016. That would lead to a Navy that is just too
small and lacking the advanced capabilities needed to execute the missions that
the nation expects of the Navy.”
Greenert said such a Navy would be unable to execute at
least four of the 10 primary missions laid out in the 2012 Defense Strategic
Guidance and the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, and its ability to respond to
contingencies would be dramatically reduced in that future scenario.
“It limits our options and the nation's decision space, and
we would be compelled to inactivate an aircraft carrier and an air wing, he
said. “Further, our modernization and our recapitalization would be
dramatically reduced, and that threatens our readiness and our industrial
base.”
If the nation reverts to the Budget Control Act caps,
Greenert added, “year by year it will leave our country less prepared to deal
with crises, our allies' trust will wane, and our enemies will be less inclined
to be dissuaded or to be deterred.”
In his remarks to the panel, Amos said the Marine Corps, in
its partnership with the Navy, gives the nation an unmatched naval
expeditionary capability.
“This is why I share the CNO's concerns about the impacts
associated with the marked paucity of shipbuilding funds,” he said.
America's engagement throughout the future security
environment of the next two decades will be undoubtedly naval in character, the
Marine Corps commandant said. To be forward engaged and to be present when it
matters most means a need for capital ships, and those ships need to be loaded
with United States Marines, Amos added.
“Expeditionary naval forces are America's insurance policy.
We're a hedge against uncertainty in an unpredictable world,” the commandant
said. “The Navy and Marine Corps team provides power projection from the sea,
responding immediately to crises when success is measured in hours, not in
days.”
If the nation is saddled with the full eight years of
sequestration, Amos said, the Marine Corps will be reduced to 175,000 Marines.
“When we built that force, we started almost a year ago
today, and we looked forward expecting sequestration would be signed in March
of this past year. So that force of 175,000, with 21 infantry battalions and
the appropriate rest of the combat service support, is a fully sequestered
force that will maintain itself out into the future,” Amos explained.
To maintain the near-term readiness now of those deployed
units and those that are about to deploy, he said, Amos said, he reached into
operations and maintenance accounts within his authorities and canceled 17
programs.
“I'll be able to do that for probably another two years,” he
added. “But the 36th commandant will reach a point, probably two years from
now, where he's going to have to take a look at that readiness level and say,
‘I'm going to have to lower that so I can get back into these facilities [and]
my training ranges that I can't ignore, and the modernization.’”
Otherwise, Amos said, “we'll end up with an old Marine Corps
that's out of date.”
In his remarks to the Senate panel, Mabus discussed the
number of ships the Navy would end up with if sequestration moves ahead as
planned. “We would get to a 300-ship Navy by the end of this decade under the
current plan, and we would keep it going forward,” the secretary said.
The decommissioning of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington
would be an issue, Mabus said. “Three destroyers, one submarine, four support
ships, and one afloat forward-staging base that we are currently planning to
build -- we could not build at those levels,” He said.
One of the perverse things that happens with sequestration,
Mabus said, is that as the Navy takes ships such as destroyers or submarines
out of multiyear contracts. “We’re breaking the contracts, which raises the
cost of the individual ships,” he told the senators. “So we get fewer, and they
cost more.”
In response to a question about whether there is an area he
considers a special problem area, the secretary cited fair compensation for
service members and what he called the unique characteristic that the Navy and
Marine Corps give the nation: presence, which he defined as “the ability to be
forward deployed, the ability to have the right number and the right mix of
ships forward, the ability to maintain those ships, the ability to have trained
crews on those ships.” That presence gives the nation options, he added.
“We -- the CNO, the commandant and I -- are working very
hard to protect that presence … with sailors and Marines on those ships to give
options to this country,” he said.
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