Cut Carriers To Save Subs, Cyber From Sequester, Thinktanks Say

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/02/cut-carriers-to-save-subs-cyber-from-sequester-thinktanks-say/



The new carrier USS Ford is afloat but still unfinished.

Cut Carriers To Save Subs, Cyber From Sequester, Thinktanks Say
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on February 05, 2014 at 4:25 PM

~snip~

To be clear, none of the four teams in a recent “budget wargame” simulating the next 10 years chose to scrap all the flattops or even most of them. None of them even stopped building the new Ford-class carriers. Instead they opted to keep the industrial base alive with new production while retiring two, three, or even four of the existing carriers, which would avoid expensive mid-life overhauls like the one the USS George Washington is due to start this year.

The thinktankers suggested sharp cuts to the carrier fleet — and to the kind of short-ranged fighter aircraft it currently carries — in order to protect what they considered higher-priority programs in space, cyberspace and under the sea (both manned attack submarines and future unmanned mini-subs). What’s more, although each team’s carrier cuts were part of a much larger package of budgetary nips and tucks to deal with sequestration, in an alternative scenario where defense spending would be cut by only half the amount of the full sequester, all four teams still chose to cut carriers — and to cut the exact same number as they had in their worst-case scenarios.

In other words, cutting the Navy’s iconic flagships wasn’t something recommended as a last resort: It was one of the first expedients the thinktankers resorted to in order to save money. That consensus suggests that support for aircraft carriers is surprisingly soft at the core of what we might call the defense-intellectual complex. That softness, in turn, seems to stem from an agreement that the Pacific in general and China in particular should be our top priority — as enshrined in the Obama administration’s 2012 “Defense Strategic Guidance” — and, in turn, that China’s ever-increasing arsenal of hackers, submarines, and long-range missiles requires us to invest in cyberwarfare, underwater, and long-range strike systems of our own

The consensus for carrier cuts was what struck me most about the briefing by experts from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which designed the budget-cut simulator, and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the pro-Obama Center for a New American Security, and the relentlessly centrist Center for Strategic and International Studies. (All the participants emphasized they were speaking for themselves, not for their institutions). But there was a lot else going on.