By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
CAPITOL HILL: The Navy and Marines are deploying at a pace they can’t sustain, says a report released today. And no feasible defense budget can build a big enough force to solve the problem, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says. Even the Navy’s famously optimistic 30-year shipbuilding plan — denounced by House seapower chairman Randy Forbes as “fantasyland” — wouldn’t close the gap between the supply of ships and the demand for them.
So more shipbuilding isn’t the solution. That is probably not the conclusion the Navy League was hoping for when it commissioned the study: “They didn’t really know what they were going to get,” said lead author Bryan Clark when he thanked his sponsors this morning. But if we can’t build our way out, what can we do?
We have to get more deployment time out of whatever ships we’ve got, said Clark, a former top aide to the Chief of Naval Operations. That includes expedients Congress may not like, especially basing more ships overseas.
Read the full story at Breaking Defense