BUSH CALLS FOR REVIVAL OF ARSENAL SHIP
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By WASHINGTON BUREAU and PILOT ONLINE
PUBLISHED: April 9, 2000 at 12:00 a.m. | UPDATED: August 17,
2019 at 8:40 p.m.
If George W. Bush wins the White House, the Navy may be
required to create a revolutionary new warship that was widely panned as
impractical a few years ago. The Texas governor’s defense platform calls for taking
another look at building an “arsenal ship,” which was designed to be the most
heavily armed and lightly manned warship ever built. With a skeleton crew of maybe 20 sailors, the surface
combatant would be packed with 500 long- range missiles that could strike deep
inside enemy territory.
As originally conceived, the ship – essentially a floating
missile storehouse – would offer military commanders massive firepower in the
opening days of a regional war at a fraction of the cost of aircraft carriers
or submarines. Critics, both within the Navy and on Capitol Hill, dismissed
the project at the time as a “sitting duck” that would be highly vulnerable to
attack – and an obvious early target because of its huge arsenal of weapons.
Local lawmakers never fought hard for the ship, partly out
of fear that the project would compete for funding against carriers and
submarines, the core work of Newport News Shipbuilding. The shipyard was part of a team of contractors that bid on
the arsenal ship in 1996. The Navy scrapped the program a year later, citing
inadequate funding by Congress. But a Bush administration would re-examine the ship as part
of an effort to modernize U.S. forces, campaign aides said.
The issue is seldom mentioned on the campaign trail, mostly
because defense policy in general has played almost no role in the presidential
race and is not a top concern of voters. But in a speech last fall at The Citadel, where Bush offered
his most detailed outline of defense policy to date, the Republican governor
made clear his determination to press ahead with revolutionary weapons systems.
“On the seas, we need to pursue promising ideas like the
arsenal ship – a stealthy ship packed with long-range missiles to destroy
targets from great distances,” he said. Vice President Al Gore, like Bush, has called for
strengthening the military, particularly to improve the quality of life of
troops and make up for years of neglected weapons modernization. But the
Democratic presidential contender has stopped short of calling for
revolutionary programs.
Perhaps the leading advocate of the arsenal ship within the
Bush campaign is Richard L. Armitage, a veteran ambassador and foreign policy
adviser who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan
administration. Armitage was a member of the National Defense Panel, a group
of strategic military thinkers that was created by Congress to critique the
Pentagon’s reform plans. The panel’s final report, issued in 1997, faulted the
Navy for canceling the arsenal ship, which it said would provide a valuable
“test bed” for new technologies. In reviving the concept of an arsenal ship, Armitage said,
the Bush campaign is hoping to stress the need for transforming all the armed
services into more mobile and cost-effective fighting forces.
“We know of no better way to signal it than to encourage the
Navy to explore such concepts as arsenal ships,” he said. The proposal won a qualified endorsement last week from Sen.
John W. Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has
talked to Bush informally about defense policy.
“I come down foursquare in support of the concept,” Warner
said. In recent months, Warner has urged the armed services to
develop revolutionary weapons that will respond to the public demand for few or
no casualties – a result, he said, of the successful 78-day air war over Kosovo
last year that was free of U.S. combat casualties. Warner has urged the Air Force to set a goal of making a
third of its strike aircraft unmanned within a decade. And he has encouraged
the Army to try making a third of its ground combat vehicles unmanned by 2015.
For the Navy, Warner said, the arsenal ship – at least in
theory – would meet the same objective. “We’ve got to move toward maximizing America’s technology to
deliver incredible quantities of firepower in order to limit casualties,” he
said. To Pentagon reformers, the appeal of the arsenal ship was
easy enough to understand. With 500 vertical-launch missile tubes, a single ship with
20 or 30 sailors could unleash massive firepower on enemy shores without tying
up an aircraft carrier and its 5,000-man crew and air wing.
And the ship’s estimated price tag of roughly $500 million,
not including the missiles, would be a bargain compared to a $5 billion carrier
or even a $2 billion submarine. “Here’s a way, without requiring a large-deck carrier, we
can kill people at a great distance,” said naval analyst Norman Polmar, an
early advocate of the arsenal ship who has consulted informally with the Bush
campaign.
“We’re talking about a ship with considerable capability at
relatively low cost with few people.” But resistance to the arsenal ship is formidable. At the Pentagon, the ship was widely considered a personal
initiative of Adm. Jeremy M. Boorda, the former chief of naval operations. “The Arsenal Ship Program is among the highest- priority
programs within the Navy,” Boorda wrote in a 1996 memo, which was cosigned by
other top defense officials.
But when Boorda committed suicide later that year, support
for the arsenal ship quickly evaporated. Boorda’s successor, Adm. Jay L. Johnson, has shown little
interest in the ship. The Navy has not bothered to discuss it – much less
promote it – since killing funding for the program in 1997.
In Congress, the arsenal ship was little more than a
mysterious concept without a political constituency. Since no one knew which
shipyard would get the work, congressmen were more concerned with protecting
funding for their own ships than diverting scarce money for an experimental
program. “For that reason, the program received a skeptical reaction
on the Hill,” recalled Ronald O’Rourke, a naval expert with the Congressional
Research Service. Beyond the political concerns, many lawmakers expressed
legitimate doubts about the arsenal ship’s potential effectiveness.
First and foremost among the myriad concerns was the ship’s
perceived vulnerability to attack. Designed primarily as a low-cost vessel housing missiles,
the ship would lack the extensive air- defense and anti-submarine warfare
systems of other surface combatants. For all its cost efficiencies, the arsenal
ship would be dependent on cruisers or destroyers for protection and could not
travel unguarded into hostile waters.
“Five hundred missiles on a platform that can’t fight back?”
asked Rep. Norman Sisisky, D- Petersburg, the senior Democrat on the House
military procurement subcommittee. At an estimated cost of $1 million per missile, Sisisky
noted, “That’s $500 million that can be attacked.” Even supporters of the ship, including Warner, acknowledge
the vulnerability problem and say more study must be done to limit the danger. While expressing support for the concept, Warner said he was
not wedded to a specific ship design and would seek “successor-type options” to
the original arsenal ship model.
Critics also argue that if the Navy wants a stealthy ship
loaded with missiles, it need look no further than the submarine, which can
operate covertly off enemy shores. Each new submarine, however, would cost as much as four
times the price of an arsenal ship. Sisisky said there might be alternatives, such as retaining
some Trident nuclear submarines that are scheduled to be decommissioned and
converting them for conventional warfare. The Navy is already exploring that
option and set aside about $1 billion in next year’s budget that could be used
for that purpose.
Even so, the 150 missiles packed on a Trident sub could not
match the 500 missiles on an arsenal ship. Providing more missile firepower – particularly the Tomahawk
land-attack cruise missile – has been a priority since the Persian Gulf War of
1991, when Tomahawks were used extensively. Whether the arsenal ship is the best way to deliver those
missiles is far from clear, but the issue could be hotly debated in a Bush
White House. The shipbuilding industry, assuming the program was dead,
has not been pushing for an arsenal ship. A Newport News Shipbuilding
spokeswoman did not rule out bidding on the ship if the program were revived,
but the yard generally has resisted straying from its core business of carriers
and submarines in recent years.
And with so much uncertainty surrounding the controversial
ship, even the Bush campaign is treading cautiously. “Mr. Bush is not saying he knows the answer,” Armitage said.
“He’s wedded to the concept of experimentation. If we don’t have a test bed,
we’ll never get there.”
SHIP AT A GLANCE
Concept: Stealthy surface combatant
Purpose: Provide massive firepower in opening days of a
regional war
Weapons: 500 missiles, including Tomahawk land- attack
cruise missiles
Design: Length of 500 to 800 feet, double hull
Number: Six vessels providing continuing presence around the
globe
Crew size: Zero to 50
Cost: About $500 million per ship in 1998 dollars, not
including missiles
David Lerman can be reached at (202) 824-8224 or by e-mail
at dlerman@tribune.com
