Presidents FY09 Navy Budget

Talk about shenanigans, Congress is playing games so they can make themselves look like a hero during an election year. It looks like when they signed the FY08 DoD budget after the veto, they changed a few things with the Navy budget numbers. For those who want to see the official Navy budget for FY09, you can find it here.

We were told the Navy bought 5 ships last year. That is incorrect, the actual number was 3, BUT they count last year for the CVN that completes funding this year so Congress can say they bought 4 in FY08. Nice eh?

It gets better. For FY09 the budget is 7 Navy ships.

1 DDG-1000
1 SSN
2 LCS
1 JHSV
2 T-AKEs

Those 2 T-AKEs will count this year not last year. This is because the headlines already went out, the Navy was building 5 ships, when in fact they built 4 if we count the CVN last year, which may not be the case. Note the DoD press conference.

On the joint maritime capabilities, it's an eight ship total program, but it really could be nine. They are -- there's a 4.2 billion in that CVN-21 carrier replacement, so that completes that carrier, although not one of those eight ships is the carrier because it was authorized last year.

He says eight and I say 7, so where is the hidden ship?

You see at the bottom there two joint high-speed vessels -- that's one for the Navy, one for the Army -- at very high command, combatant commander requirement.

In other words, one of the eight is Army. We might see Congress attempt to take credit for the CVN this year so they can say they reached the magic number of 10 ships, but if they do that it would mean they only build 3 ships total for FY08. We'll wait and see, hopefully Gene Taylor has his eye on the ball here, because here is the real problem.

During the Clinton administration, the Navy built 40 ships. During the Bush administration, assuming they build even 8 ships, and that is an enormous IF, the Bush administration would end up building 48 ships for an average of 6 per year. By comparison, the Clinton administration built 40 ships, for an average of 5 per year. Too bad Bush will have spent twice as much money for only 8 more ships. Do the math, if ships last on average 30 years that means a fleet of between 165 -195 ships even with the LCS.

Nobody can blame the LCS for the shrinking fleet, the entire cost of the LCS program to date doesn't equal even 1 DDG-1000. Clearly the DDG-1000 is where the money is.

If you want to dig and find something interesting, we encourage folks to take a look at the National Defense Sealift Fund, there are quite a bit of proposed changes in there, including some interesting cost estimates on the Sea Basing plan.

In all, we are not impressed, for all the talk of changes coming following the strategy, we see no change at all.