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from https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/17/marines-furious-over-the-navys-plan-for-troop-carrying-ships-00087716

Marines furious over the Navy’s plan for troop-carrying ships

The budget doesn’t include money to buy an amphibious ship, and the
Marines aren’t buying the Navy’s argument.

Chief of U.S. Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday testifies during a hearing before Senate Armed Services Committee.
“The driving issue here that drove that decision had to do with cost,”
Mike Gilday said at the McAleese Defense Programs conference. | Alex
Wong/Getty Images

By PAUL MCLEARY

03/17/2023 05:34 PM EDT

By the time the Pentagon rolls out its annual budget request each
spring, leaders usually have hashed out the details and present
themselves — at least in public — as a united front.

Not this year.

The Defense Department this month rejected a key element of the Navy’s
newest shipbuilding plan, touching off a behind-the-scenes scrum that
spilled out into public view this week over the future of troop-carrying
ships that are the centerpiece of the Marine Corps’ seaborne mission.

The disagreement raises questions over what direction Pentagon
leadership wants to go in building new amphibious ships to ferry Marines
and their equipment around the globe as the Corps pivots to countering
China after two decades in the Middle East.

It’s the latest flareup in a yearslong debate over what kind of ships to build for the Marines, as policymakers try to chart a course for the
future in which Beijing has quickly emerged as a military and economic
rival.

The Navy on Monday announced that this year’s budget blueprint won’t include money to fund the 17th San Antonio-class amphibious ship, a $1.6 billion vessel that carries Marines and launches helicopters and watercraft.

The reason comes down to money, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike
Gilday said Wednesday.

“The driving issue here that drove that decision had to do with cost,” Gilday said at the McAleese Defense Programs conference, explaining that
it was the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s decision to carry out a “strategic pause” in buying and constructing amphibs.

He noted the unit cost of the first three ships belonging to the ship
class’s latest version — called Flight II — has gone up with each hull. “We’re moving in the wrong direction,” he said.

The same day Gilday spoke, Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger rejected
the cost argument. “You could say it’s more expensive today. Well yeah,
so is a gallon of milk, right, than last year. I got that. But in base
dollars, I think industry is driving that price down.”

The decision to pause the ship funding is part of a wider relook at the Navy’s amphibious ship programs ordered by the Pentagon, to consider
whether they align with broader policy goals. The Navy had only just
submitted an amphibious plan to Congress in December, but the Pentagon
ordered a redo and the Navy, to the frustration of the Marine Corps, did
little to push back.

“We just did a study and came up with a number [of ships], we would like
to know what has changed over the past few weeks” that requires a new
look, said one Marine officer, who like others quoted for this story,
was granted anonymity to speak candidly about an internal issue.

The Navy referred questions on the need for the new study to the
Pentagon, and Pentagon officials did not respond to a request for comment.

SETTING A COURSE
The issue of the amphibious fleet in particular has become a cornerstone
issue for the Navy as it struggles to modernize to meet China’s
increasingly effective anti-ship capabilities, putting large ships such
as amphibs and aircraft carriers at greater risk.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, speaking at the McAleese conference,
didn’t say the service is walking away from the amphibious ship program,
but instead is taking the pause before putting money toward the ship and
any next-generation amphibious ships, which the Marines say they
desperately need.

Berger argued that the Navy is squandering a moment where the
shipbuilding industry is primed to keep building the vessels. But now “we’re going to take a timeout. From my perspective, I can’t accept that when the inventory, the capacity has to be no less than 31” ships.

The number is a reference to the “bare minimum” of what the Corps says
it needs to meet Pentagon tasking.

The actual number of hulls will drop to 24 this decade if Congress
allows the Navy to follow through on plans it presented on Monday to
begin retiring some of the oldest ships without buying replacements.

The problem has real-world consequences. The Marines have said that
twice over the past year the service has been unable to deploy in
emergency situations due to lack of ships. The first time came when
Russia invaded Ukraine and a Marine unit couldn’t head to the region,
and the second was in February when a unit couldn’t provide humanitarian assistance after the devastating earthquake in Turkey.

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The halting of the ship’s production this week along with the Pentagon’s squelching of the Navy’s plans recall a similar event in 2020, when then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper publicly rejected the Navy’s annual
30-year shipbuilding plan, and personally oversaw the writing of a new
document that was released months later, in the lame duck days of the
Trump presidency.

This split between the Navy and Marine Corps “is partly [the Pentagon’s] fault,” according to Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer now at the
Hudson Institute.

The competing visions for the size and composition of the fleet revolve
around how it will prepare to confront or deter China in the coming years.

“The problem is the large amphib requirement is based largely on
peacetime presence needs, rather than warfighting scenarios,” where amphibious operations would not likely be heavily employed, Clark said.
The Pentagon “has prioritized meeting needs for defending an invasion of Taiwan and other warfighting scenarios over presence needs, so the large amphibious ship requirement goes unfilled.”

While strategies remain in flux, neither the Pentagon nor the Navy has
been able to offer a detailed explanation as to why the December study
needed immediate rethinking.

“If you want to kill a program, you commission study after study and you study it to death,” a Senate aide said.

Leaders across the Pentagon are “really at loggerheads” on the
amphibious ship issue, and “coupled with the strategic pause comments,
it really gets you to a place where you can understand that the
anti-amphibious coalition is in the driver’s seat on this one,” the aide continued.

PLANS HELD UP
The amphibious plan, which is being worked on by the Navy, Marines and
the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office is just one
of three shipbuilding plans the Navy owes the Pentagon and Congress this
year.

The annual 30-year shipbuilding plan, which is required to be submitted
along with the budget, is late for the second year in a row. Navy
officials say it will be released in the coming weeks, however.

The Navy came under fire last year from Capitol Hill for releasing a
30-year plan document that offered three options rather than a single
plan. Under that guidance, the first option would build a 316-ship fleet
by 2052, the second sketched a 327-ship Navy and the third, which the
service said in the document that the industrial base is currently
unable to support, would yield a 367-ship fleet. The first two options
fell short of the congressionally mandated 355-ship Navy, which the
service maintained as its goal since 2016 but had made no progress
toward reaching.

Del Toro confirmed this week he’ll present a document with the three
options again, and the new plan will also include a menu of
possibilities for Congress and Pentagon leadership to consider.

The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger
Wicker, said in a statement this week that “no matter the favored phrase
of the day – ‘divest to invest,’ ‘strategic pause,’ ‘capability over
capacity,’ – the president’s defense budget is, in practice, sinking our future fleet.” Wicker’s state of Mississippi is home to the Huntington Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, which builds the San Antonio-class ships.

While the new $255 billion Navy budget was the highest ever, “we’re not going to be swimming in money forever,” said Gilday, the Navy admiral. “We’ve got to start making some hard decisions.”

FILED UNDER: MARINES, U.S. NAVY, MICHAEL GILDAY
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