The House Sequestration Hearing

The service chiefs testified in the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. The video is not yet available. Written statements are available. This is from Navy Times.

For the Navy, the budget cuts will affect the carrier fleet and its attendant strike group fleets and aircraft squadrons. The Navy will continue to maintain a single deployed carrier strike group presence in the Pacific and one in the Middle East region.

But sending out additional carriers — as the Navy has in recent weeks in response to the Syria crisis — is becoming difficult.

“What do we have to surge? It’s getting less and less, and I’m very concerned about it. Today one carrier strike group, one amphibious-ready group is ready to surge with their organized training equipment. Normally ... we have three,” said Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations.

Greenert did not specifically address Hagel’s suggestion in July that the Navy may have to shrink today’s fleet of 11 carriers to potentially eight, a move that would dramatically and permanently reduce the Navy’s operational tempo and eliminate the need for many of the destroyers, fighter squadrons and other support units typically attached to carrier strike groups.

He said the surface fleet likely will have to fall toward about 255 ships, about 30 less than today’s total fleet and far lower than the 306 that is the Navy’s official target for its shipbuilding program.

Greenert said one of his biggest concerns about the budget cuts is their impact on the Navy’s ability to develop a replacement for the Ohio-class ballistic submarines, a key component of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. That program to build new ones, the so-called SSBN(X), may be unaffordable under current budget levels, he said.

One important point not mentioned in the Navy Times article is that it would appear the Navy is putting the mid-life refueling of the USS George Washington (CVN-73) on the table in FY15.

I thought the hearing went well except when the CNO listed his three top priorities as:

1. SSBN(X) Ohio-class replacement
2. Cyber
3. Deploying naval forces

I have some problems with this list, and am confident that over the next week these topics will be discussed on the blog. If Cyber is a more important priority for the CNO when it comes to Navy funding than ships, subs, aircraft, sailors, and airmen... then I have spent the entire year reading the wrong books on seapower.