Battle Over How to Count Navy Ships is Confusing, But
Not New
Lawmakers and Navy
leadership spent the past year going back and forth over how to count the
number of ships in the Battle Force fleet. The Navy made some changes last
spring that immediately increased the size of the fleet and complicated the
ship-counting effort: certain ships would count only if they were
forward deployed but not if they returned home to the United States. Congress
pushed back, passing into law what was essentially a compromise counting rule –
and the third methodology to be used in a one-year span.
As a result of the back-and-forth, the
Navy’s most recent ship-count projection it submitted to Congress contains two
sets of figures: one with the Navy’s preferred method, and one following
Congress’s rule.
The dueling methods have led to
confusing charts and tables earlier this year, but the conflict over how to
count Navy ships is not new – the Carter and Reagan administrations both
created their own sets of rules for counting ships.
For most of the Navy’s history, the
number to focus on was the number of active ships in the fleet – those that had
been commissioned into the Navy and were manned by active duty crews. Naval
Reserve Force ships were not included.
The Carter administration, however,
created a Ship Operating Forces method for counting ships, which included “all
active, reserve, and civilian-manned ships owned by the Navy,” according to a 1985 report by the
Congressional Budget Office.
When the Reagan Administration came
in, officials – including Navy Secretary John Lehman, of the 600-ship Navy fame
– decided that many of the ships “were not considered sufficiently important by
the administration to be included against the 600-ship goal,” the CBO report
said. Lehman created the Battle
Force ship count that was used for three and a half
decades, until current Secretary Ray Mabus changed the rules in March 2014.
The idea behind the Battle Force
count method is “to include in the count ships that are readily deployable
overseas and which contribute to the overseas combat capability of the Navy,”
Ron O’Rourke, naval affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service,
explained to USNI News on Friday. It doesn’t discriminate between active duty
and Naval Reserve Force ships, he said, as long as a ship meets those
requirements.
As a result, Defense Department
ships that support Army and Air Force operations do not count, nor do Maritime
Prepositioning Force (MPF) ships that primarily support Marines ashore.
O’Rourke noted a quirk in these
requirements in the footnotes of a recent report,
writing that previously planned but since canceled MPF
(Future) ships “would have contributed to Navy combat capabilities
(for example, by supporting Navy aircraft operations). For this reason, the
ships in the planned MPF(F) squadron were counted by the Navy as battle force
ships” even though current MPF ships were not counted.
These Battle Force counting rules
were not formally changed until just recently – though the Navy did, in
practice, make at least one change. For example, O’Rourke said, older classes
of patrol craft were deemed eligible to be counted as Battle Force ships,
including the Pegasus-class hydrofoil boat (PHM-1). But the Navy at some point
changed its view about whether to include patrol craft in the count and did not
include the Cyclone-class patrol ships (PC-1) when they entered the fleet.
Last spring, Mabus announced a ship-counting rules change in a letter to Congress. Patrol craft and mine countermeasures ships would count as
Battle Force Ships, but only if they were operating in the Forward Deployed
Naval Forces. Those ship classes, if stationed stateside, would not count.
Hospital ships and a High Speed Transport would count. And so would cruisers
laid up for extended modernization periods.
Congress stepped in, rejecting the
idea of counting PCs, even though the older class of patrol craft were counted,
and hospital ships. The current counting method under the law, therefore, mixes
the Reagan-era method and the Mabus-proposed method. Future historians will
have to bear in mind that the Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 Navy budget request spoke
of projected ship counts in the Lehman-era methodology, the FY 2015 budget
request in the short-lived Mabus methodology, and the FY 2016 budget request in
both the Mabus and the congressionally mandated methodologies.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm.
Jonathan Greenert wrote in his testimony to Congress that as of Jan. 1, the
Navy had 288 ships by the Mabus methodology but only 279 by Congress’s; would
have 291 in FY 2016 by the Mabus methodology but only 282 by Congress’s; and
would have either 308 or 304 in FY 2020, with the gap closing as PCs retire.
The chart includes the footnote:
Navy revised the accounting guidelines for its Battle Force according to
requirements set forth in the FY2015 National Defense Authorization Act.
Numbers in this statement are not directly comparable to those used in prior
testimony, see chart below. The NDAA prohibits inclusion of “…patrol coastal
ships, non-commissioned combatant craft specifically designed for combat roles,
or ships that are designated for potential mobilization.” Ships that were
counted last year, but are no longer counted, are Patrol Craft (PC) and
Hospital Ships (T-AH).
No comments:
Post a Comment