A senior budget analyst said the Navy should ask for a plus-up of its shipbuilding account to fund the Ohio Replacement ballistic-missile submarine rather than using a separate account outside of its budget.
Todd Harrison, senior fellow of defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, briefing reporters Jan. 30 with background for the fiscal 2016 defense budget to be released Feb. 2, said the Navy has been “forthright in warning members of Congress and the public that they can’t squeeze the Ohio Replacement submarine program into their shipbuilding budget, with all of the other shipbuilding programs that are going on.”
However, Harrison criticized the Navy’s argument that, with the ballistic-missile submarines being national assets as part of the strategic nuclear deterrent triad, the Ohio Replacement should not be in the Navy’s shipbuilding budget but funded in a separate account.
“Just because you reclassify the budget account, it doesn’t get you out of the budget cap,” he said. “It doesn’t get you out of the DoD [Department of Defense] budget. You’re just relabeling it. Really, what the Navy is trying to do is make this a separate account and take budget share out of the other services to pay for it.
“The other services are, of course, wise to this. Why wouldn’t the Air Force say that their Minuteman III modernization program be classified the same way? Why shouldn’t the Air Force’s Long-Range Bomber [program] … also be pulled out of the Air Force’s budget?
“It makes no difference,” he said. “You can reclassify these things and pull them out of the services’ accounts and they’re still part of the DoD budget. They’re still the same amount of money that we’ve got to spend.
“If they need more money to pay for the Ohio Replacement, ask for more money. It’s a zero-sum game in a budget-capped environment. That money has to come from somewhere, so let’s just admit that it is going to come from the Army,” Harrison said.
Congress already has created a Sea-Based Strategic Deterrent Fund account outside of the Navy budget, but has not yet allocated any funds for the line as of Jan. 30.