ARSENAL SHIP

 

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