This week in The Bunker: the Navy plans to spend a cool $1 trillion to expand its fleet; the Pentagon pursues yet another wonder weapon; Russian progress in Ukraine could be costly; and more.
BATTLE $TATION$!
Boosting Navy won’t be cheap
The Navy’s plan to expand its fleet by 85 vessels between now and 2045 to counter the growing Chinese threat to U.S. allies in the western Pacific is projected to cost an eye-watering $1 trillion. “The cost of the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan is high not only compared with recent funding but also by historical standards,” the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported January 6. The extra funding would grow the fleet from its current 296 crewed ships to 381, the CBO estimated.
Good luck, swabbies, though, in getting the dough: According to USNI News, “the 2025 plan to recapitalize the Navy’s fleet will cost about $40.1 billion annually — about double what the service has received from Congress for shipbuilding over the last five years.” (CBO notes that’s 17% more than the service’s own in-house estimate.) And that’s not all: That recent wave of shipbuilding dollars is at “its highest level since the Reagan Administration’s defense buildup in the 1980s,” the CBO added. Under current plans, the Navy will shrink to 283 ships in 2027 before recent funding increases begin to bulk up the fleet. The rapid growth of the Chinese navy as the main reason it needs the extra money.
But even such a mind-boggling sum won’t be enough. Garden-variety destroyersare costing more than anticipated and taking longer than expected to build. The recent $5.6 billion boost in the Navy’s submarine budget to deal with projected cost overruns isn’t sufficient, according to the chief of the nation’s biggest shipbuilder. President-elect Trump, he added, may be more “receptive” to boosting wages to crank up naval production.
But the incipient commander-in-chief, like anyone else paying attention, doesn’t like how the Navy buys its warships. Trump recently torpedoed the Navy over the Constellation-class (PDF) frigate program launched during his first term. “They were going and really doing a good job, and … the Biden admirals and generals and all of the people that are involved, they started playing around and tinkering and changing the design, and this, you know ... that costs a lot of money,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt January 6. “They always have to make changes. You know, these guys get in there, and they think they’re smart, and in many cases, unfortunately, they’re not smart, and they take something and they make it worse for a lot more money.”
Well, here’s a dirty little secret, Mr. President-to-be-again: bloated, over-spec’d, not-ready-for-prime-time, threat-inflated weapons are a multi-billion-dollar bipartisan scourge. You can count on The Bunker to cheer any effort to reverse course, but your actions will speak louder than your words.
SPEAKING OF PIPE DREAMS
The Pentagon’s never-ending quest
No one has ever accused the Department of Defense of thinking small. Take its Speed and Runway Independent Technology — SPRINT — program, designed to develop an aircraft capable of flying 500 miles an hour that doesn’t require runways. Sure, the Pentagon’s had helicopters since World War II, but they’ve been pretty slow and can’t fly very far. More modern VTOL — vertical takeoff and landing — aircraft include the all-but-retired AV-8B and the current V-22 and F-35Baircraft. But they have to balance their hover-ability against speed, leading to compromises in both. That’s why the resident Pentagon eggheads at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are trying to develop the world’s first-ever High Speed VTOL.
Just as the Navy argues that China is forcing it to expand, Beijing is also the preferred Pentagon pry bar to launch this fledgling flock of flying machines. DARPA’s efforts “underline an urgent need for U.S. decision-makers eyeing future aircraft built for the vast range and distance challenges posed by operations in the contested Pacific region,” military-aviation analyst Jon Hemler noted January 6.
Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing subsidiary, and Bell Flight, a Textron division, are vying to build this new warbird. Bell boasts that its “stop/fold rotor system” (video, alas ground-based, here) “is a game-changing blend of helicopter hover capability and jet-like speed, range and survivability.” Aurora asserts its “fan-in-wing” test aircraft will be uncrewed, but that it “would be fully transferrable to traditional aircraft with crew.” That may sound like a step backwards, but what does The Bunker know?
One thing The Bunker does know is that the Pentagon routinely exaggerates the China threat. Any effort to thwart its expansionist ambitions is going to require that Beijing’s nervous neighbors — including economic powerhouses Japanand South Korea — invest far more in their own defense.
BARGAIN HUNTING
Does Trump recognize a good deal?
U.S. taxpayers have invested $66 billion in Ukraine’s battle against Russian invaders over the past three years. It’s a lot of money — but it’s also a real bargain. The Bunker crudely calculated 18 months ago that the U.S. (and its allies) have helped decimate the Russian military for only 4% of the Pentagon’s annual budget.
But President-elect Trump is pushingUkraine to sit down with Moscow’s marauders to negotiate a peace that would reward Russia for its land grab. Trump, who co-wrote The Art of the Deal, appears also to be co-authoring Vladimir Putin’s The Art of the Steal. “Vladimir Putin has no interest in a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukraine intact as a sovereign nation,” Robert Kagan wrote January 7 in The Atlantic. “Trump must now choose between accepting a humiliating strategic defeat on the global stage and immediately redoubling American support for Ukraine while there’s still time. The choice he makes in the next few weeks will determine not only the fate of Ukraine but also the success of his presidency.”
While that may be a stretch, there’s a better way to try to get Trump to do the right thing. “A world in which Russia prevails would be more dangerous and more expensive for America — requiring an estimated increase of $808 billion in defense spending over five years,” a January 9 assessment from the American Enterprise Institute concluded.
All of this: $1 trillion more for additional ships, a who-knows-how-costly newly-fangled Tom Swiftian warplane, the near-trillion-dollar cost if Russia scores big in Ukraine, represent all-too-typical Washington hyperbole. Things are never as bleak as the sky-is-falling crowd says they are. It’s up to the rest of us to temper such histrionics with history.