By: Megan Eckstein and Ben Werner

February 18, 2020 6:08 PM

USNI.org

Under Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly speaks to Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard officers during the National Naval Officers Association (NNOA) symposium on Aug. 7, 2019. US Navy Photo

The Navy is kicking off an effort to repurpose $40 billion in spending over the next five years as it faces pressures to grow the fleet, continue to boost readiness and build a new fleet of ballistic missile submarines amid flat budgets.

Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly wrote that, “as we prepare to go to Congress to defend our Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 budget request, it has become increasingly apparent that we have a challenging story to tell. We are facing three critical pressurizing mandates that are conspiring to limit our ability to deliver the Integrated Naval Force required by the National Defense Strategy,” reads a memo signed today.

The FY 2021 request fully funds the Columbia-class SSBN, as required by the National Defense Strategy and as part of an overall recapitalization of the nuclear triad by the Navy and Air Force. However, the budget does little to grow the force, and in fact proposed early decommissionings of some ships would mean the Navy would have one fewer ship by the end of 2025 than it would at the end of 2021. The budget appears to continue previous years’ efforts to fund aircraft and ship maintenance as fully a possible, though ship maintenance funding is limited by industrial base capacity in some cases, the budget request notes.

“All thee of those mandates are occurring within a flat budget environment we expect to continue to several years. Therefore, we must act now to make tough, fiscally-informed choices in order to fund our key strategic priorities using the budget we have, not the budget we wish we had,” Modly continues in the memo.
“We must find savings within the Department to reinvest in the kind of decisive naval force that will provide for our nation’s future economic and political security. The bottom line is that we need to find at least $40 billion in real line-of-accounting savings to fund the development, construction, and sustainment of this new fleet over the next 5 years, and to set the Department up for continuing this trajectory in the 5 years that follow.”

The Department of the Navy (DoN) Stem-to-Stern (S2S) Review will seek savings of $8 billion a year over the next Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), from FY 2022 through 2026, and those cost savings will be reinvested in growing the fleet in line with the results of the upcoming Integrated Naval Force Structure Assessment, accelerating digital modernization across the force, and “advancing our intellectual capacity and ethical excellence,” reads the memo.

Modly notes that $8 billion a year is actually only 7 percent of the topline — though it is more aggressive than the similar Army effort last year, dubbed “Night Court,” which similarly sought to find cost-savings in the budget by looking at every spending item to evaluate its need.

“The Department of the Army has engaged in similar reviews as the S2S over the last two years through a process they called ‘Night Court.’ In these ‘Night Court’ sessions, they identified approximately $13 billion in savings over the FYDP. As always, it’s time to BEAT ARMY!” the secretary wrote, ending the memo with the same line he’s used in his weekly SECNAV Vectors memos.