For military-minded lawmakers, the month of March 2001 was a quiet one on Capitol Hill—far too quiet.
Accustomed to receiving presidential defense budget proposals by late February, members of Congress instead held their breath while President George W. Bush's new administration conducted a top-to-bottom assessment of military strategy. Rumors flew. Were the new tactical aviation programs in peril? Would the recommendations upset the traditional balance of the services?
President Bush received his first briefing from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on 21 March, and two days later The Washington Post dropped a bombshell: according to an anonymous source, the new administration might be thinking about trimming the carrier fleet.
It was a pulse-pounding jump start to the 2002 defense budget process.
The Budget Cycle Begins
Building the Navy budget goes on forever; five-year plans evolve into concrete spending proposals and the cycle begins anew. But if you could pick a starting point for lawmakers, it might be September's end-of-session hearings before the congressional armed services committees.
Two years ago, senators pried from the Joint Chiefs of Staff the first admission that readiness in the post-Desert Storm era might not be up to snuff. This year, the service chiefs were unabashed in asking for more money.
The fiscal year 2001 budget contained $91.9 billion for the Department of the Navy, and long-range planners were not optimistic about large increases the following year. In their budget briefing books, Navy leaders predicted the service's appropriations would dip to $91.1 billion in fiscal year 2002.
In September 2000, the new Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Vern Clark, needed little prompting to lay out his service's financial woes. The Navy needed $16 billion more per year if it were to sustain the fleet's size, restock its supply chain, and roll back its maintenance backlog, Admiral Clark said.
"We're in a Catch-22," he told senators on 27 September. "If we spend more on current readiness, we spend less on modernization. The solution is topline relief."
These election-year messages resonated in campaign-trail promises of beefed-up spending by then-Governor Bush and Vice President Al Gore. But once in office, President Bush dashed many Pentagon hopes first by rejecting calls for an immediate $7-- 10 billion supplemental increase, then by declaring he would stick with Bill Clinton's rough-draft fiscal year 2002 spending blueprint of $310 billion.
The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee was not shy about his opinion of the figure (too low) or what Congress should do about it: kick in $8 billion more. In a March 2001 letter to the Senate Budget Committee, Senator John Warner (R-VA) wrote, "My analysis shows that current readiness is in jeopardy—both now and in the future—because of aging, over-used equipment, rapidly increasing costs and shortages of spare parts and operational funding.... If current requirements are not addressed in the fiscal year 2002 budget resolution, a fiscal year 2002 readiness supplemental request will be necessary."
Warner's plus-up was not the lowest under discussion on the Hill. The Congressional Budget Office's estimates topped the Pentagon's pleas, predicting that it would take $340 billion to maintain present force levels.
Refusing to be shackled by the status quo, President Bush insisted on a fresh look at military strategy. In March, Secretary Rumsfeld presented preliminary findings to the President. At press time, the plan remained largely secret, but the Post and other newspapers offered titillating nuggets from anonymous sources.
"Rumsfeld's review is likely to call on the Navy to stop building huge aircraft carriers and start designing a new, smaller carrier that is less vulnerable to missiles," the Post reported on 23 March. "'The big loser is the carrier,' said one person familiar with the review."
This prompted cries of alarm, privately from admirals, publicly from Senator Warner. In a statement, the senator expressed confidence that the review "will reaffirm the time-tested basic doctrines of the importance of carrier aviation," even if it raises questions about size and configuration. Senator Warner said that he supports the defense review, but added—perhaps as a warning—that "the president proposes and Congress disposes."
One observer noted that taking on carriers, or other big projects, would be a steep uphill battle. "All of the congressional votes and the congressional interests are aligned with the military status quo," Loren Thompson, director of the Arlington, Virginia-based think tank Lexington Institute, told the Virginian-Pilot.
Shipbuilding
Fiscal year 2001's budget kept the number of Navy ships and subs locked at 316, but the passage of another year did not change the arithmetic of aging: to keep the fleet from shrinking, the Navy must lay down eight to ten new hulls a year.
The 2001 spending plan contained money for eight vessels: three Arleigh Burke (DDG-51)-class guided-missile destroyers, two San Antonio (LPD-17)-class amphibious warfare ships, a Virginia (SSN-774)-class attack submarine, a T-ADC(X) dry cargo carrier, and CVN-77, the last of the Nimitz (CVN-68)-class carriers. Congress also kicked in an unrequested $460 million toward advance procurement of another San Antonio-class amphib.
Still, Navy leaders pushed for more. Meeting the requirements of the current national strategy would take a 360-ship fleet, Rear Admiral Joseph A. Sestak Jr. told attendees on 31 February at the 2001 American Shipbuilding Association forum on Capitol Hill. In coming decades, the Navy wants to boost surface fleet numbers from 101 to 180, he said.
One of the lawmakers who dropped by the forum said he supported a bigger fleet, but could not fathom where Congress might find the money.
"That's the problem," said the late Representative Norman Sisisky (D-VA). "We want to increase the procurement act and hope to increase the top line, but don't know from where. Do you cut one program to fund another? We don't know."
Increases on that scale likely would have to start with the new Quadrennial Defense Review, slated for release this fall.
Aircraft
The fiscal year 2001 budget bought 128 aircraft, including 42 F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, five E-2C Hawkeyes, and 15 V-22 Ospreys. (Congress again upped the requested funding by $115 million, to be put toward two CH-60 helicopters and an extra KC-130J cargo aircraft.) The five-year Navy plan called for 130 more aircraft in 2002. Meanwhile, two industry groups flew prototypes of the Joint Strike Fighter, the "stealthy-yet-affordable" aircraft Navy planners see as the fleet's mainstay after 2010,
But the new administration has clouded the long-term tactical aviation picture. Echoing Department of Defense aviation analyst Franklin Spinney and others, President Bush said the nation might not be able to buy the Air Force's $62-billion F-22 stealth fighter, the $200-billion Joint Strike Fighter fleet for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, and the Navy's $46-billion Super Hornet.
"There are three potential fighters, and I think it is realistic for me, the President, to say to people that I'm not so sure we can afford all three," President Bush told reporters in March.
A further warning sign on the Joint Strike Fighter: during a 20 March press conference, Secretary Rumsfeld declined to predict its survival—even though he shared the podium with British Defence Minister Geoffrey Hoon, whose country has sunk more than $2 billion into Joint Strike Fighter research.
NMCI
The Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), an audacious—some say unsettling—attempt to slash costs and boost bandwidth on shore facilities in the Navy Department, created its own Capitol Hill tempest. Championed by then-Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, the $7-billion plan envisions the replacement of hundreds of the Navy's custom-built networks with a faster net whose hardware and software would be installed, maintained, and upgraded under a single contract.
But when Secretary Danzig and his deputies began to round up money for the project, lawmakers balked—first at the unorthodox specifications, then at accounting methods. In February 2000, the chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Readiness, Representative Herbert H. Bateman (R-VA), wrote Secretary Danzig with concerns about the lack of documents for the project in the service's fiscal year 2000 and 2001 budget documents.
Congressional critics erected another roadblock in May 2000. The House Armed Services Committee pulled purse strings to stop the service from spending money on NMCI until lawmakers got more information. "Called to the Hill, Navy officers began lobbying lawmakers for approval, reminding House Armed Services members how fast technology becomes outdated while the government moseys through the procurement process. For instance, one Navy captain briefed lawmakers 47 times," wrote Government Computer News.
Eventually, lawmakers were persuaded to give the go ahead—but took steps to make sure no other Department of Defense organization would try to spend so much money without direct congressional oversight.
Vieques
Meanwhile, debate continued on Capitol Hill over the fate of the Navy's premier training facility: the live-fire range at the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.
Riding a tide of resentment that crested after a civilian guard was killed by an errant bomb in 1999, the commonwealth's new governor, Sila Calderon, continued the push to end military exercises on the island. Heeding Navy and Marine Corps cries of readiness distress, House Armed Services Chairman Representative Floyd Spence (R-SC) was perhaps the most vocal lawmaker to call for the resumption of live bombing. Still, Secretary Rumsfeld ordered a halt in early March to Vieques exercises by the Enterprise (CVN-65) carrier battle group.
Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA) offered an alternative solution: move the exercises to a nearby Caribbean nation.
"Given the combination of an ally that seeks greater military presence and our future needs in the Southern Hemisphere in terms of security, training and interdiction, I encourage you to consider the possibility of entering into a new military relationship with the country of St. Kitts and Nevis," Weldon wrote Rumsfeld in March 2001.6
The tiny island nation's prime minister, Danzel Douglas, "expressed a sincere interest in pursuing the possibility of having a substantial U.S. military presence in St. Kitts and Nevis," Weldon wrote, adding, "This may prove to be a resolution to our impending training crisis due to the probable future loss of Vieques."
As is its wont, Congress looked into a host of other naval issues. The bombing of the guided-missile destroyer Cole (DDG-67) in October 2000 prompted a series of hearings, as did the question of military absentee voting. Early in 2001, Senate Armed Services Committee staffers announced their intention to look into the federal government's armed forces retirement homes in an attempt to decide whether they should be improved—or perhaps simply shuttered.
Coming Up: A New QDR
Even if the White House signals its intent to spend more on defense this year, big changes likely will wait until the release of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). Although the 1997 version of this Department of Defense document was lambasted for enshrining the status quo, observers believe the 2001 edition could suggest more drastic changes.
As director of the Navy QDR Support Office, Rear Admiral Joseph Sestak is the service's liaison to the Department of Defense staffers who will draw up the QDR. To push for a substantial increase in funding, the surface warfare officer knew he had to change the terms of the debate—on Capitol Hill as well as in the Pentagon.
Navy officials must "make it clear what you get for your investment," allowing Congress and the nation to "step back and make a determination about size and shape," he told a reporter at the 2001 Surface Navy Association convention.
At that convention, Admiral Sestak offered attendees a spectacular preview of a brief he would deliver to Pentagon and congressional representatives. Instead of discussing brush-fire contingencies or the two-major-theater-war strategy, he said the nation should think about how the Navy protects seagoing trade-and the U.S. economy. In addition, the Navy prevents conflicts by showing the flag to allies and enemies around the globe. The fleet also can influence events ashore, by destroying enemy targets or swathing allied territory in a missile shield.
Admiral Sestak vividly illustrated this last point with a spectacular set of computer animations depicting a crisis in the Persian Gulf. In this imagined conflict, transparent red domes sprouted over enemy airfields, then disappeared as Tomahawks blew up targeting radars. Meanwhile, Army and Air Force units arrived in theater, protected by the green blankets of ship-based missile defense systems.
Here is the crux of the military in the 21st century, according to Admiral Sestak: neither the Army's nor the Air Force's lighter, faster-responding forces will work unless the Navy's forward-deployed weapons are there to protect them.
"If we can't have assured access, then we're back to the Cold War, where we have to fight our way in," he said.
Mr. Peniston is a former managing editor at Military.com and is the author of Around the World with the U.S. Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999).