American Shipbuilding Association

CONTACT:
Cynthia L. Brown
202-544-8170

Washington, D.C. - Cynthia  Brown, President of the American Shipbuilding Association (ASA), which represents the Nation’s shipbuilding industry, calls the President’s fiscal year 2005 budget “deeply troubling”.  “It cuts funding for naval ships by $100 million while increasing the Department of Defense (DOD) budget by $26.4 billion, or 7%.  Cutting funding for naval ships is reckless when we do not have enough to fight the war on terrorism.”

“Ships are the cornerstone of the President’s military strategy against terrorism.    The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were waged from submarines and surface ships.  More than 800 cruise missiles were launched from ships, Marines and Special Operations Forces of all Services were deployed from ships, and the Navy and Marine Corps flew 9,362 air combat missions -- more than the Air Force.  Yet ships continue to get short-shrift in the President’s budget,” said Brown.

“The gutting of America’s naval power is frightening.  The fleet of the Navy has shrunk from 594 ships in 1987 to 294 today.  Budgets of the last 12 years have bought only six new ships a year, on average.  At this production rate, the fleet will drop to fewer than 200 ships,” she said. 

“The Navy and DOD state that numbers don’t matter, that capability is what counts.  Yet, the five-year budget emphasizes investment in least capable vessels for single missions versus multi-mission, highly capable and survivable surface combatants and submarines.  If it’s capability rather than numbers, then the Nation should be buying more multi-mission DD-X and DDG-51 destroyers, attack submarines, and aircraft carriers,” according to Brown.  “Investment in small, single purpose vessels and one submarine per year will not sustain an industry to build a Navy.”

Brown stated, “One only has to look at the war in Iraq to understand that America needs a larger and more capable fleet.  For a war of relatively short duration, 70 percent of the Navy’s surface fleet and 50 percent of its submarine fleet was deployed to Iraq.  The remaining ships were either undergoing repair, engaged in security patrols in other troubled regions, or being used to train our Sailors and Marines.  This deployment rate was the highest since World War II, and it nearly broke the back of a fleet too small to defend America.”

“Equally alarming is the fact that the United States is losing the industrial and skill capability to ever rebuild America’s sea power.  Over the past decade, naval shipbuilders have eliminated jobs of tens of thousands of highly skilled engineers and manufacturing employees, and are struggling to maintain their diminished workforce. The number of companies manufacturing critical ship systems and components has been reduced by 60 percent and hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost.  Today, there remains only one company still in business to make many of each of the critical components essential to a warships operation, and that remaining company is hanging by a thread,” said Brown.

“The decimation of American jobs and the defense shipbuilding industry is being hastened by the Administration’s policy to export shipbuilding jobs.  DOD is buying ships from Australia and South Korean via long-term leases rather than ordering ships in the United States, and the Navy is buying more and more critical ship components from foreign sources.  National leaders are exporting America’s defense and economic sovereignty with the export of each shipbuilding job,” she said.   

“America’s Navy cannot be rebuilt quickly in an emergency.  Skilled shipbuilders take years to train and the construction time of each naval ship is four to seven years.  America’s defense depends upon the strength of her naval fleet on D-Day – not seven years after D-Day.  This is why our Founding Fathers vested in Congress (Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution) the authority to “provide and maintain” a Navy.  Maintaining a strong and robust Navy is essential to our ability to respond to any given crisis on any given day,” said Brown.

She said, “We should take note of the history of Great Britain, which ceased to invest in sea power and ceased to be a world power.  As a result, Great Britain did not have a Navy capable of projecting sufficient power to South America in the 1980’s to defend the Falkland Islands against a small country with limited military capability.  Great Britain ultimately succeeded in the Falklands because of the help of the United States.  Who will help the United States when we no longer have the power to project forces around the world?  China?”

She concluded, “There has never been a super power that is not a sea power, and America is rapidly losing her sea power.”

Wake up Washington!  Wake up America!