Congressional Watch in 1990

Congress’s consideration of the Bush Administration’s proposed fiscal year 1991 budget for the Department of the Navy indicated that 1990 was a transi­tional year in the debate on national de­fense. It was clear in the spring that the Cold War was coming to an end, but Congress was only beginning to come to grips with the concept and what it might imply for U.S. defense policy and pro­grams. “Transition” and “uncertainty” were the common terms in discussions in Congress of the future international secu­rity environment.

Administration officials acknowledged that the fiscal year 1991 budget proposal submitted in early 1990 did not ade­quately take into account the dramatic changes in the international security envi­ronment that occurred in the second half of 1989. The broad budget outlines in many respects had been already deter­mined when those international changes took place. Moreover, to the consterna­tion of some members, the administration in 1990 did not submit a new multiyear defense plan as required by statute. This left Congress with only the fiscal year 1990-1994 plan, which had been submit­ted in 1989 and was universally regarded as obsolete under the new strategic cir­cumstances. One member of the House Armed Services Committee noted that the failure to submit a new multiyear defense plan put the services in the position of asking for billions of dollars in advanced procurement funding for future-year pro­curement programs, even though a new plan for future-year procurement had not been submitted. This applied particularly to the Navy’s shipbuilding budget, which included a request for more than $1 bil­lion in advanced procurement funding for the Seawolf (SSN-21) nuclear-powered attack submarine program alone.

Administration officials promised that the fiscal year 1992 defense budget and fiscal year 1992-1997 defense plan would fully take into account the changed world situation. In the meantime, they asked that conclusive debates on some issues be deferred a year, until 1991, when the new budget and defense plan would be submitted. This added to con­gressional frustration on issues such as sealift and naval aviation, where already a policy drift had been perceived going into the fiscal year 1991 debate, and where there was a desire for specific pro­posals and concrete action.

Last year was thus transitional between strategic eras and defense plans. This rendered some debates inconclusive, but it also set the stage for the development of issues and arguments that carried over to the debate this year.

Naval Forces As Forces of Choice

In the opening phases of their testi­mony to Congress on the fiscal year 1991 budget, Department of the Navy leaders attempted to establish the theme that naval forces were particularly well-suited to the defense challenges of the emerging post-Cold War era. Naval forces, they

Key Senate Armed Services Commit­tee member Senator John Glenn (D-OH) meets Vice Admiral Henry H. Mauz, Jr., in the Persian Gulf.

pointed out, historically have been used heavily in the kinds of regional contin­gencies that were becoming the focus of U.S. defense planning. And naval forces, they argued, are mobile, flexible forces that can project U.S. power overseas in the inevitable period of limited U.S. ac­cess to overseas bases. As a conse­quence, they argued, naval forces would be the forces of choice for U.S. policy­makers in the post-Cold War era.

In stressing this theme, they were de­veloping a line of argument first set forth by Secretary of the Navy James Webb in January 1988, a month before he left of­fice, in a widely noted speech on future

U.S. defense policy at the National Press Club. In retrospect, the theme of naval fores as the forces of choice for U.S. leaders in a changed world may be the rhetorical successor to the Maritime Strategy, which has lost force as a unify­ing argument for naval forces since 1988 and all but disappeared from Department of the Navy testimony.

In the congressional arena, the impor­tant implication of this new central theme was that naval forces should be protected as the defense budget declined, thus shifting the budget in their favor. The Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen­eral A. M. Gray, stated the argument most directly, but it was implicit in the testimony of Secretary of the Navy H- Lawrence Garrett III and then-Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Car­lisle A. H. Trost, as well.

The argument had a clear logic to it, and many members either supported or received it without dissent. On the House Armed Services Committee, one mem­ber, not known as a strong supporter of naval forces per se, remarked that limits on overseas base access would increase the importance of U.S. aircraft carriers.

But there was a limit to Congress’s apparent acceptance of the need to protect naval forces in reducing the defense bud­get, and the Department of the Navy’s testimony exceeded it. When asked how the changed world environment would affect naval force structure requirements, naval leaders essentially said that it would not change requirements in any substantial way. CNO Admiral Trost at one point said that even if one were to put one’s hand over the map of eastern Eu­rope and disregard it entirely as a defense planning concern, the United States would still require a navy not only of about the same size, but of the same gen­eral structure as well.

Prior to this testimony, a point paper from the House Armed Services Commit­tee stated that the new security environ­ment suggested a need for a navy with a stronger emphasis on surface ships and a reduced emphasis on attack submarines. Upon hearing that a changed world would still require a navy of the same size and structure, a senior member of this com­mittee characterized the Navy’s response as “counterintuitive.” When this point

came up again before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Navy’s testi­mony again elicited strong negative reac­tions.

To naval leaders, the idea that naval force structure requirements should re­main essentially unchanged was not counterintuitive at all. Maintaining a standing naval presence in various re­gions to deter regional crises, they under­stood, would require a large surface fleet. The Soviets’ continuing emphasis on naval construction, especially in subma­rines—which, like Soviet strategic nu­clear programs, showed little sign of abatement in spite of Soviet ground-force reductions—would require a continued U-S. emphasis on attack submarines and antisubmarine warfare programs.

Nevertheless, the Navy’s bottom-line argument that the recent changes in the World situation implied no changes in naval requirements appeared to some members as overreaching. It played into *he hands of critics who had lambasted the Navy over the years as an obstinate, arrogant service in need of stronger con­trol by the Office of the Secretary of De­fense. And it contributed to a perception that the Department of the Navy was Unwilling to recognize and respond to changing times.

Most important of all, however, it hampered the important budget-share argument implicit in the forces-of-choice theme. Naval leaders in effect argued that the changed international security envi­ronment called for a shift in the composi­tion of U.S. defense spending toward naval forces, while at the same time they maintained that this changed environment called for no shift in the composition of the Navy’s own budget. This appeared to be an argument of convenience intended to exempt the Navy from difficult deci­sions among competing spending priori- hes in a declining budget environment.

In stressing the forces-of-choice theme, Department of the Navy testi­mony to Congress hinted at the existence °f a dispute within the Department of Defense over how to allocate future de­fense budget cuts. The Department of the Navy view on this dispute does not ap­pear to have prevailed. Under the pro­posed fiscal year 1991-1997 defense Plan, the Department of the Navy’s share °f the defense budget will remain essen- fially unchanged, resulting in the need for substantial naval force-structure cuts. And Department of the Navy testimony this year, while still raising the forces-of- choice argument, does so in a more mod­est, chastened manner that stresses joint operations and the role of naval forces as enabling agents in contingencies that re­quire the introduction of substantial ground and air (i.e., Army and Air Force) assets.

Aircraft Carriers and Naval Aviation

In naval aviation, 1990 was a disas­trous year for procurement planning, a fact fully reflected on Capitol Hill. Its status had been a growing concern in Congress since 1988, and the desire in Congress was for 1990 to be the year in which these concerns were addressed and resolved. Instead, the year ended up with naval aviation procurement planning in a state of disarray. This heightened con­gressional concerns and put the Navy in the difficult position of attempting to de­fend its proposed aircraft procurement budget to Congress without a credible long-term plan to back it up.

A number of other naval aviation de­velopments in 1990 were unsettling: (1) a wavering Navy commitment in its ver­sion of the advanced tactical fighter; (2) a reported reduction in the F-14 remanu­facturing program from 400 aircraft to as few as 104; (3) reported problems in the P-7 program, the subsequent cancellation of that program, and the cancellation shortly after that of the announced fallback option, the P-3H; and (4) grow­ing uncertainty over the status of the ad­vanced tactical support aircraft program, which was to provide a common airframe to succeed the EA-6B, the E-2C, and the S-3.

All these developments, however, were dwarfed by the A-12 calamity. The anxiously awaited major aircraft review (MAR) presented to Congress in April reduced the planned A-12 buy to 620 air­craft, down from 858. But this was less of a cut than it was made out to be, be­cause the 858-plane goal included pro­curement for the Marine Corps, which had testified a year earlier that it did not want the plane. The release of the MAR proved to be the high point for the A-12 program, for it was not long after that the revelations of technical problems, cost growth, and flawed program manage­ment integrity began to mount. The can­cellation of the A-12 procurement con­tract in January 1991 completed the collapse of naval aviation procurement planning. The scandal surrounding it may not yet be fully played out. The fiscal year 1992 budget, which constitutes a quickly-put-together first step on the part of the administration to restore coherence to naval aviation procurement, has been received with little enthusiasm in Con­gress. A member of the House Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Procurement this year has referred to naval aviation as being in “Chapter 11”; other members have expressed strong dissatisfaction with the fiscal year 1992 proposal.

The administration in the fiscal year

Out the V-22 would go, if Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney—here with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Colin Powell—had his way. But Congress is keeping the program alive for now.

1991 budget attempted for a second time to cancel the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor air­craft. But V-22 supporters in Congress had their case strengthened in 1990 by the results a long-awaited Cost and Opera­tional Effectiveness Analysis comparing the V-22 against helicopter-based options for the Marine Corps’s medium lift re­placement program. The administration’s continued opposition to the V-22 after the release of the analysis frustrated V-22 supporters. In the end, Congress once again kept the V-22 program alive, against the administration’s wishes.

The Navy’s testimony in 1990 on air­craft carrier force levels set forth, for the first time, the real numbers concerning the number of aircraft carriers needed to keep one continuously deployed in an overseas operating area. For many years, Navy testimony either encouraged or did not correct the three-for-one rule widely used in carrier force-level planning and justification—that for each forward- deployed carrier, another two must be in the inventory. That rule, it turned out, was never correct, because it failed to take transit time and periodic long-term overhauls into account. And it is less cor­rect now than it was many years ago, because of the personnel tempo policy decision in the mid-1980s to limit time at sea to no more than 50% of total time.

For carriers based in the United States, it turns out that five carriers must be in the inventory to keep one forward- deployed in the Mediterranean, five or six must be in the inventory to keep one forward-deployed in the Western Pacific, and seven or eight must be in the inven­tory to keep one forward-deployed in the Indian Ocean. Because of the economies of homeporting a carrier in Japan, where it can be counted as forward-deployed in the Western Pacific, even when it is tied up at the pier, the requirement for main­taining a carrier in the Western Pacific can be reduced to fewer than two ships, and the total requirement for keeping one carrier forward-deployed in each of these three operating areas accordingly comes to about 14 hulls.

At an important hearing before the Conventional Forces and Alliance De­fense Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Navy’s testi­mony was confused and not apparently effective, and in its wake it seemed an almost foregone conclusion that the Navy in future years would be reduced to 12 deployable carriers. Indeed, further de­bate in 1990 on the carrier force level focused not on whether to keep the 13th or 14th carrier, but on whether to reduce the carrier force further to 11 or 10 ships, or even fewer.

ASW and Attack Submarines

ASW has been an area of strong con­cern in Congress since the mid-1980s, when the capabilities of the Soviets’ new- generation submarines, particularly the Akula-class nuclear-powered attack sub­marine (SSN), became known. As with naval aviation, members of Congress had expressed concern in prior years over the ability of the Navy to coordinate its ASW efforts and devise an ASW master plan for the future.

Navy leaders in 1990 continued to maintain that ASW was their number one war-fighting priority, even though some in the Navy appeared uncertain as to whether this was appropriate, given changes in the international security envi­ronment. To bolster the case for a contin­ued strong emphasis on ASW, Navy tes­timony stressed that there was no evidence of a reduction in the rate of So­viet submarine launchings and accep­tances. Navy officials also added a new line of argument, stressing the growing non-Soviet submarine threat to U.S. naval forces, which in the future would include submarines equipped with air- independent propulsion systems. These two themes were mixed in a glossy-paged booklet on ASW distributed to congres­sional offices.

The submarine community has set forth a four-point argument: (1) The rate of Soviet submarine launchings and ac­ceptances shows no sign of having fallen off. (2) Submarine ASW includes ASW against a growing non-Soviet submarine threat. (3) Submarines have missions other than ASW, including covert sur­veillance and reconnaissance, covert in­sertion and extraction of personnel, anti­surface warfare, mining, and cruise missile attack, that apply to Third World conflicts. (4) Submarine procurement must be maintained at a rate sufficient to maintain an adequate submarine con­struction industrial base.

When asked directly at a hearing be­fore the Projection Forces and Regional Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee what nu­clear-powered attack submarine force level would be appropriate, Assistant CNO for Undersea Warfare (OP-02) Vice Admiral Daniel Cooper said he would like to maintain a force of 80 to 90. It was unclear whether this represented the De­partment of Defense position, the Navy position, or only the submarine com­munity’s position. The Navy in its testi­mony this year says it wants to maintain a force sufficient to keep 14 on forward deployment. But it does not state how large a force this requires.

The major warship review announced in August reduced the planned SSN-21 procurement rate to three boats every two years. The reduction heightened concerns in Congress over the growing unit pro­curement cost of the SSN-21 program, and over the ability of the program to sus­tain both of the submarine construction yards.

Concerns in Congress over concur­rency in the BSY-2 combat system and other elements of the SSN-21 program continued in 1990. Hearings were held on the issue, and the Senate Armed Services Committee, citing concerns over concur­rency, recommended procurement of two Los Angeles (SSN-688)-class submarines rather than any SSN-21s. In the end. Congress adopted the recommendation of the House Armed Services Committee to fund a single SSN-21—the second boat in the program—in fiscal year 1991 at a cost of almost $1.8 billion. Reflecting its concern over the industrial base issue, Congress added extensive report lan­guage concerning the manner in which the contract for this boat was to be awarded.

The one-vote-per-year pattern estab­lished in fiscal year 1991 is now pro­jected under the new defense plan to con­tinue through fiscal year 1995. This has further heightened congressional con­cerns over the future of the submarine construction base, and over the afford­ability of the SSN-21 program, in which the boats will now cost $2 billion each.

Surface Combatants

Congressional battleship supporters accepted with resignation the administra­tion’s proposal to retire the battleships Iowa (BB-61) and New Jersey (BB-62) under the fiscal year 1991 budget but fought off an attempt in the Senate to ex­tend the deactivations to the remaining two battleships. As of this writing, battle­ship supporters appear to face a difficult task in overturning the administration’s proposal to retire the final two ships, the Missouri (BB-63) and the Wisconsin (BB-64), despite the role both played in Operation Desert Storm.

The major warship review treated the guided-missile destroyer Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) program more favorably than the SSN-21, reducing its planned pro­curement rate to four ships per year, down from five. Congressional debate on the DDG-51 program in 1990 focused to some degree on alleged contracting abuses, but this issue in the end did not appear to reduce support for the program.

Sealift

Frustrated with what it perceived to be insufficient administration attention to the issue over the years, Congress for fis­cal year 1990 appropriated $600 million in unrequested funding for procurement of new sealift ships. The Gramm- Rudman-Hollings sequestration on the fiscal year 1990 defense budget reduced this figure to $592 million. In its fiscal year 1991 defense budget, the adminis­tration proposed transferring this $592 million to help fund M-l tank and F-15 fighter procurement. Predictably, this exasperated supporters of additional U.S. sealift assets.

Eventually, some of the $592 million was reprogrammed to help cover a fund- mg shortfall in a personnel-related ac­count, leaving about $375 million in available funds. The administration’s re­luctance to obligate this funding into any sealift program appeared to confirm in the mind of some congressional sealift supporters the administration’s unwill- uigness to do anything substantial to im­prove U.S. military sealift capability.

At a joint hearing in late 1989 before the Sea Power Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee and the Merchant Marine Subcommittee of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee covering sealift issues, one administration official, citing the changed world situation, testified that sealift requirements, like all military re­quirements, were under review. He fur­ther testified that it was possible the re­view could conclude that the United States did not need any additional sealift. This drew a strong reaction from one member, a longtime sealift supporter. The Shipbuilders Council of America criticized the statement and included it in Point papers that it circulated on Capitol Hill.

For sealift supporters, Operation Desert Shield was a vindicating event. At ^a September hearing on sealift held in the Wake of the early stages of Desert Shield, administration officials began to ac­knowledge a need for an improved sealift capability. Congress appropriated an additional $900 million in unrequested funding in fiscal year 1991 for additional sealift, making a total of $1,275 billion available for obligation. The administra- hon as of this writing has still not obli­gated this funding, but says that it will soon complete a new mobility require­ments study and recommend a program for spending the funds. Sealift supporters ^ln Congress are now awaiting this study and the accompanying recommendations hut have made it clear that their patience °n the issue has been almost exhausted.

Naval Arms Control

Naval arms control is not at the top of the congressional arms control agenda, hut interest in the topic has grown over the last two years, and 1990 featured two major congressional hearings that dealt With naval forces in the arms control pro­cess. The first, a two-part hearing in Jan­uary and March before the Asia and Pa­cific Affairs Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, focused on the potential for arms control in the Asia/ Pacific region and not surprisingly de­voted considerable time to proposals that would affect naval forces. The hearing was well attended by Asian representa­tives and journalists, and the committee put the Navy’s witness on the spot to identify a naval arms control proposal— any proposal— that the Navy could sup­port.

The second hearing, also in two parts, was held in May by the Projection Forces and Regional Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee and was devoted to naval arms control. The witness at the first part was retired Soviet Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who now acts as a senior arms control adviser to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The second part featured an administra­tion panel that included CNO Admiral Trost.

The two-part hearing was notable in at least three respects. First, Akhromeyev’s testimony was not very well prepared or persuasive, which was surprising, given the importance of the forum and Soviet frustration over what they see as U.S. inattention to their proposals.

Second, the subcommittee chose three possible areas within naval arms control on which to concentrate: (1) further naval confidence- and security-building mea­sures; (2) a ban or limit on nonstrategic naval nuclear weapons; and (3) a bilateral U.S.-Soviet limit on attack submarines. This selection of issues represented an important attempt to lend some structure to the congressional and domestic U.S. debate on naval arms control, which had been rather amorphous up to that point.

The third notable aspect of the hearing was the administration’s testimony, which communicated a subtle but very important shift in tone. Until then, ad­ministration policy had edged toward a stance that tended to reject the entire con­cept of naval arms control. At this hear­ing, however, the administration’s ap­proach was not so much one of rejecting naval arms control as one of rejecting the specific naval arms control proposals that the Soviets had been proposing. Admin­istration officials supported some propos­als, such as doctrinal discussions and re­ciprocal visits, and even stated that the administration might be willing to engage in talks on nonstrategic naval nuclear weapons—provided that two unlikely but nevertheless theoretically possible condi­tions were met.

In reporting its version of the fiscal year 1991 Defense Authorization bill, the Senate Arms Services Committee di­rected the administration to prepare a re­port addressing in detail the three specific areas of naval arms control selected by the subcommittee for special attention, as well as any other areas that might be of interest. The report was due on 1 Febru­ary of this year, but Operation Desert Storm delayed delivery until late March. The report is expected to serve as the basis for a further round of hearings on naval arms control this year.

The Fiscal Year 1991 Debate

Congress is now attempting to distill the lessons learned from Desert Shield/ Desert Storm and take them into account in marking up the fiscal year 1992 re­quest. The lessons-learned debate has the potential to affect congressional views on a number of issues of importance to the Department of the Navy, including the role of naval versus other forces in re­gional military contingencies; the balance of land- versus sea-based air power; up­grading existing aircraft designs versus procuring new-generation aircraft; cruise missiles and their effect on the roles and missions of manned aircraft, surface combatants, and attack submarines; the value of amphibious forces and the roles and missions of the Marine Corps versus the Army; mine warfare, especially in shallower waters; and sealift and mari­time prepositioning.

Increasing the fiscal year 1992 defense budget so as to avoid some of the pro­jected program cuts would require alter­ing the executive-legislative budget sum­mit agreement, which set specific limits for defense spending in these two fiscal years. If the budget summit agreement is not altered in some way, increasing the funding level in these years for some de­fense programs would require reducing it for others.

In many respects, 1990 was a difficult year for the Navy in its testimony to Con­gress. Congress went into the year with a sense that coherent plans and proposals in certain key naval areas were lacking and overdue. Rapid changes in the world situ­ation and serious problems in some key naval procurement programs made it dif­ficult for Navy officials to defend their proposed budget. The Navy presented its arguments poorly in some cases, and Congress’s sense of frustration and dis­satisfaction with Navy plans and pro­grams appeared to increase. Debates that developed in 1990 have continued into 1991, and are now influencing Congress’s consideration of the new bud­get and defense plan.

Mr. O’Rourke is a Specialist in Naval Affairs cur­rently working at the Library of Congress for the Congressional Research Service.