On the chopping block: a perfectly good aircraft carrier, a handful of aging cruisers, four of the Navy's 14 ballistic-missile submarines and another 5,000 sailors beyond expected cuts over the next five to 10 years.
They’re just proposals, but they aren’t idle chatter. These and other spending cuts are under serious Navy consideration as the Pentagon determines how to parcel out the multiyear $350 billion defense spending cuts mandated in August. It could get worse. An additional $850 billion, 10-year hit will be implemented if a special joint congressional committee fails to agree on how to trim more than $1 trillion from the federal budget and enact those reductions by Jan. 15.
The Navy’s share, and what form the cuts will take, remains to be seen/.../
A leading defense budget analyst agreed on the need for a rigorous review.
“All of the things that the Navy is required to do today -- are all of these things essential?” asked Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “And I think any reasonable person would conclude, ‘No.’ So then you prioritize your roles and missions, and then you look at the bottom of that priority list. And that’s where you would start cutting.”