JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii — The Navy’s chief of naval operations had some positive news for sailors about shortened sea deployments during an all-hands call Friday afternoon — but budget cuts this coming year could undo all that progress.
The USS Carl Vinson is now deployed in the Arabian Gulf on a nine-and-a-half month deployment, said Adm. Jonathan Greenert to about 1,500 sailors seated in a basketball arena. However, its eventual replacement, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, will deploy for more than a month less than that.
“The carrier after that should be on a seven-month deployment,” Greenert said, adding that amphibious groups, submarines and maritime patrols with aircraft are all now down to deployments of seven months or less.
Greenert said the extended deployments sprang out of mandatory budget caps enacted by Congress several years ago after lawmakers came to an impasse on spending and taxes.
Those so-called sequestration cuts call for a mandatory reduction of about $1.1 trillion in discretionary spending — which includes defense — over the years 2013 to 2021.
Lawmakers eventually agreed on a deal allowing higher defense spending for the past two budget cycles, but further cuts are slated for the budget year that begins Oct. 1 unless another deal is hammered out.
That would “probably” lead to more extended deployments, Greenert told reporters during a news conference after the all-hands call, after which he planned to travel to Australia and New Zealand.
“Some would say that’s because we’re going to try to get all this done with less force,” he said. “But really, it’s because we wouldn’t get maintenance done on time. We wouldn’t have enough people in the public ship yards at Pearl Harbor. That work would take longer to do. You may not have overtime authorized.”
That delay in work has a “cascading downward effect,” which means deployed ships would have to stay at sea longer.
He described the work of modernizing and maintaining ships to a conveyor belt, “and I can’t crank up the speed on this thing. I don’t have the money to do it.”
Greenert was adamant, however, that the sequestration cuts won’t affect the Pacific rebalance.
“Presence in the Pacific won’t change much, because I will invest in that, very much.”
He said his top priorities are the strategic deterrent of ballistic missile-armed submarines and providing forward presence “where it matters, when it matters, in that distribution.”
He said that the 50 ships now forward-deployed in the Pacific will increase to 60 by 2020.
“That will pretty much remain on track regardless of sequester,” he said.
The effects of sequestration cuts will come in shore operations, maintenance, training and modernization, he said.
“So if you’re not on deployment and you come back, you’ll probably shut down, stop flying. I’m sure you’ll be delayed going into maintenance, a smaller maintenance package because of what we can afford. That will affect Hawaii from the perspective of these modernization packages that we bring in. We bring a destroyer in and take it to the next level in ballistic missile defense. We’ll be pushing those out.”
Ultimately, if the sequestration caps become the new norm, Greenert said he and the other service chiefs would recommend a new national defense strategy, one that matches the budget rather than some other greater goal.
He said that continued sequestration would force the Navy to abandon important elements of the current 10-point strategy. He said such cuts would not allow the force to “project power in an anti-access, area-denial environment” and would deprive its ability to simultaneously “defeat an enemy and deny an enemy in another area of the world.”
olson.wyatt@stripes.com
Twitter: @WyattWOlson
No comments:
Post a Comment