Resource Implications of the Navy's Interim Report on Shipbuilding

Abstract

On March 23, 2005, the Department of the Navy released An Interim Report to Congress on Annual Long-Range Plan for the Construction of Naval Vessels for FY2006. The report includes projected inventories for a 260-ship fleet and a 325-ship fleet through 2035, suggesting that the Navy's total future requirement for ships may fall within that range . (The Navy's current fleet numbers 287 ships.) According to Admiral Clark, the 260-ship plan would cost about $12 billion a year for ship construction, and the 325-ship plan would cost about $15 billion a year for shipbuilding.2 (Those figures exclude the cost of refueling nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines.) The Navy's report provides few details about how many ships the service would have to buy each year to implement either the 260- or 325-ship plan and thus how big a budget it would need for ship construction. (The report states that the Navy will provide a more detailed final report in the summer of 2005 that will discuss the number of ships that would need to be built.) In this analysis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) uses the inventory tables in the Navy's interim report to estimate the annual ship purchases, ship-construction budgets, and fleet inventories that are implied by both plans. The results of the analysis, as presented here, are methodologically consistent with CBO's work in The Long-Term Implications of Current Defense Plans: Detailed Update for Fiscal Year 2005 (September 2004), updated with information from the President s 2006 budget. The analysis does not address research and development costs for new ships that may be required in the future or operation and support costs for the two fleets. The Navy's 260-ship and 325-ship plans are, for the most part, numerically consistent with the President s 2006 budget submission. In terms of ship purchases, the two plans are similar to each other until 2015.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 25, 2005
Accession Number
ADA447163

Entities

People

  • Eric J. Labs

Organizations

  • Congressional Budget Office

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircraft Carriers
  • Amphibious Operations
  • Amphibious Ships
  • Arleigh Burke Class
  • Attack Submarines
  • Ballistic Missile Submarines
  • Ballistic Missiles
  • Destroyers
  • Guided Missile Submarines
  • Guided Missiles
  • Littoral Combat Ships
  • Naval Operations
  • Naval Vessels
  • Navy
  • Shipbuilding
  • Submarines
  • Virginia Class

Readers

  • Defense Financial Management and Audit.
  • Industrial Economics
  • Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering.