How bad could funding for the Navy get in the next few years? Well, just degrees of bad and nothing that points to good.
Coming off the previous administration who at least had an open priority to grow the US Navy, the following should give navalists pause.
The Navy and the Pentagon are crunching numbers on two separate sets of studies that will map out the size of the service’s future fleet as defense budgets are set to stay static for the foreseeable future, officials familiar with the studies told USNI News.
The Navy is performing its own assessment of the fleet architecture needed to counter future threats past the Fiscal Year 2024 budget, while the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) is also evaluating the fleet design for the FY 2023 budget that will come out early next year.
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The efforts come as defense officials continue to predict flat or declining budgets in the coming years that will make it difficult for the Navy to build toward its goal of a larger fleet to maintain an edge over China in the Indo-Pacific.
While re-capitalizing the SSBN, producing the FFG-62, finishing development of the Large Surface Combatant … so yeah, not a lot of flex there.
The Biden administration’s FY 2022 budget submission did not include a fleshed-out 30-year shipbuilding plan, nor did it have the usual five-year budget outlook. Instead, the 30-year shipbuilding blueprint included ranges of ships the Navy could buy for each type of vessel.
Maximum flexibility while the new team jelled around what they wanted.
Hudson Institute senior fellow Bryan Clark told USNI News… the FY 23, maybe the FYDP, is sort of locked in and then the question is, well what does the force structure look like after that. And that’s what this effort is probably intended to do.”
That is exactly correct. What is being done now will set the foundation for what will follow.
There is a lot to worry about, but there are two significant shaping events that will signal the direction and magnitude in natsec priorities for the next few years; (1) 2022 Global Posture Review; (2) Results of the 2022 election.
There is a better than average chance that (1) will not give navalists what they want, but that (2), if the House changes parties, that a Republican win will be enough to keep things steady or not as dramatic a drop of funding than if those I discussed on yesterday’s post gained more influence than they already have in a (D) run House.
Best case scenario right now is steady-state through 2024 money wise – but that doesn’t mean we cannot continue to advance in our thinking of our response to the world as it develops so we can maximize the utility of what we can buy and prepare for more favorable budgetary environments at some point down the road.
