The U.S. Navy’s eagerness for new ship designs driving lucrative contracts for new ship constructions has largely produced poor results and wasted money.
Commentary
On Aug. 14, the $460 million littoral combat ship USS Sioux City, after less than five years in service, was decommissioned. That the Navy is retiring ships that were supposed to serve for a minimum of 25 years in just five years is frustrating. That the Navy dumped another $4 million to $5 million into the ship to
fix its combining gear just a
few months before decommissioning the ship is maddening.
But this kind of waste isn’t uncommon.
In April 2008, after 47 years of service, the USS Enterprise entered the Northrop Grumman Newport News shipyard for an 18-month extended docking for the purpose of undergoing a major refurbishment to be completed by September 2009 at a cost of $453 million. As the months rolled by, the completion schedule slipped to April 2010 and costs for the refurbishment rose to $662 million—46 percent over budget. In 2023 dollars, that’s $921 million. Then, in December of 2012, the Enterprise was decommissioned. So, a major refurbishing of nearly $1 billion was executed on a ship destined for the scrap yard in just a couple of years.
In the late 1990s/early 2000s, senior Navy leadership, in order to make way for new ship construction for their future employers (defense contractors), prematurely retired and scrapped the Navy’s best anti-submarine warfare ships, the powerful and versatile Spruance-class destroyers. The new ships for which the Spruances were sacrificed included the
Zumwalt-class destroyer and the
littoral combat ship, of which the Navy was going build 32 and 56, respectively. Of course, both the Zumwalt and the littoral combat ship turned out to be failures, ending up providing a tiny fraction of their predicted combat power despite costing taxpayers north of $50 billion and counting.
Sadly, if properly maintained, the Spruances could have provided many times the combat power for a fraction of the cost of the new ships. Then, adding insult to injury, even as plans moved forward to destroy the Spru-Cans, as the Spruances were affectionally known, the Navy continued to spend money on upgrading them. But taxpayers can feel satisfaction knowing that defense contractors got paid for both the new ships and the upgrades for the soon-to-be-destroyed Spru-Cans.
Then, we have the May 18, 2022, $8 million modernization contract the Navy issued for the USS Vicksburg, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser—the latest in multimillion-dollar contracts that cumulatively add
up to nearly $200 million to modernize the Vicksburg. While the Vicksburg was undergoing these taxpayers-funded modernizations, it sat idle in a Norfolk, Virginia, shipyard for six years, even as the Navy struggled to meet its commitments because of a shortage of ships. True to form, senior Navy and Pentagon leadership, eager to create as much pressure on Congress to support new ship construction, is pressing Congress to allow them to decommission the Vicksburg, if not this year, then next year.
Another example of money the Navy is apparently eager to waste on modernizing the Ticonderogas is the USS Chosin, which
completed its modernization in February of this year. The modernization of the Chosin’s weapons, communications and information systems, and other areas of the ship took 1.7 million man-hours and roughly $150 million and were supposed to ensure that the Chosin could sail well into the 2030s as one of the most powerful surface warships in the world.
Although it’s true that the Ticonderoga’s SPY-1B Aegis system isn’t as powerful as that of the Aegis systems on newer Arleigh Burke destroyers, it’s still plenty capable. And the Ticonderoga has more firepower than any Burke with 122 VLS missile cells versus 96 cells on the newest Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyers. It carries two versatile MK-45 5-inch guns versus the Burke’s single gun. It also has considerably more cruising range, 6,000 nautical miles versus 4,400 nautical miles.
If the capabilities of the newer Aegis systems are needed for a particular scenario, a Ticonderoga, using the Navy’s
cooperative engagement capabilities, could have its vast missile magazine put under the control of the newer Burkes. Yet despite spending more than
$2.4 billion over the past seven years to overhaul and modernize the still powerful Ticonderogas, the Navy is now planning to decommission all of them within the next four years.
The retirement of the aging but still capable Ticonderoga cruisers, the premature retirement of the littoral combat ships, the premature retirement of the Spruance-class destroyers, the retirement of super capable Nimitz-class carriers to be replaced by less capable and less resilient Ford-class carriers, and the retirement of a whole slew of Los Angeles-class submarines will likely see our
Navy shrinking in both number of ships and total displacement.
The Navy’s standard argument for retiring older ships is that older ships cost more to maintain and that by retiring ships such as the Ticonderogas and Spruances they can put the money into new, more capable ships that cost less per year to maintain.
However, when it comes to capability, it’s arguable that although on paper, the newer ships that were supposed to replace the older ships were more capable in some areas, they were inferior in others. While it’s true that on a per ton of displacement basis, newer ships will generally cost less to maintain, it’s also true that in specific, newer ships such as the Zumwalt and the littoral combat ships that have unreliable systems and major design flaws that costs billions to correct can cost a whole lot more on an annual basis than older ships.
It also must be pointed out that the annual maintenance and repair costs of older ships that have gone through a major refurbishment, overhaul, or refit can be significantly decreased. Consequently, even when you factor in the Navy’s exaggerated cost differential for operations and support, an overhauled Spruance destroyer would have cost less than the expensive, problem-ridden ineffective ships that were built in their stead.
The sum result of all the above is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Navy’s eagerness for new ship designs driving lucrative contracts for new ship constructions has largely produced poorly vetted designs full of unproven systems based on flawed concepts of operations that have cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars to get a weaker, less capable, less lethal Navy.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
