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Watchdog: Navy Ships Involved in Deadly Collisions Were Missing Certifications
Katherine Blakeley, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Congress has appropriated increasingly more money for readiness since 2009.
Analysis
Not Too Cold, Not Too Hot
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush worried less about rallying the nation to action against the terrorist threat than about warning an enraged public that the campaign would not end anytime soon. The president referred to the emerging “global war on terror” as a generational struggle—one that would go on well past his own tenure and one that would lack an emotionally satisfying endpoint such as V-J Day or the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the News
President Trump, Republicans Still Face Defense Spending Showdown
The president's fiscal 2018 budget request is $52 billion above the budget-control cap. The request is also three times more than the average amount by which Congress has been able to raise caps in the past. The unreconciled House and Senate budgets are about $90 billion above defense caps, according to Katherine Blakely, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).
In the News
U.S. Navy Ships in Fatal Collisions Not Properly Certified
But the certification reports suggest that the U.S. Navy may have knowingly sent ships to sea that weren’t fully certified for the missions they were conducting, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“This appears to be endemic of a systemic problem,” Mr. Clark said. The Seventh Fleet destroyers and cruisers “may not have had sufficient practice to do the difficult transits they were doing,” given the crowded waters they operate in.
In the News
US Navy wants bigger and more capable unmanned drone ships for future navy
The Navy could potentially get by with fewer ships if some of the larger, more capable unmanned vehicles could someday reliably do some of the easier missions ships do, but it’s not a one-for-one replacement, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
In the News
Strains on crews, vessels set the stage for Navy crashes
In the past two decades, the number of Navy ships has decreased about 20 percent, though the time they are deployed has remained the same, according to a 2015 report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington research group funded by the Defense Department. The increased burden has fallen disproportionately on the 7th Fleet.