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Taylor Says Adding More DDG 1000s
Will Bust Navy Budget, Force Delays
The details of next year’s defense
budget request have not even
hit Capitol Hill yet, but a key House
lawmaker has taken a pre-emptive
strike at any efforts to revive the
Navy’s DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class
destroyer program.
House Armed Services seapower
and expeditionary forces subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor, D-Miss., released a statement Feb. 5
warning that building any more
than the three DDG 1000s now
planned would devastate the
Navy’s budget.
The destroyer program — which
was cut from seven ships to three
last year — is among the programs
that have “crippled the Navy shipbuilding budget and forced years of
delays in providing needed capability to the fleet,” said Taylor, who
last year led the charge on the Hill
to curtail the DDG 1000 and
instead buy more of the older, but
more affordable, DDG 51 Arleigh
Burke-class destroyers.
U.S. MARINE CORPS
Significant cost growth on the
DDG 1000 program, he added,
“will require diverting funding
from other new construction projects to pay the overrun.”
The DDG 51 and DDG 1000 are
built at General Dynamics’ Bath
Iron Works, Bath, Maine, and at
Northrop Grumman’s Ingalls
Shipyard, Pascagoula, Miss., which
is in Taylor’s district.
Taylor later acknowledged that
his statement came — at least in
U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Joseph Thompson of the 26th Marine
Expeditionary Unit greets U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., during the congressman’s visit to the USS Iwo Jima in Bahrain Dec. 19. Taylor led the charge last
year to curtail the Navy’s DDG 1000 destroyer, and already is speaking out
against any effort to revive the program in the next defense budget cycle.
part — in reaction to a memo distributed in late January by outgoing Pentagon acquisition chief
John Young, who, as a longtime
supporter of the DDG 1000 and a
former Navy official, has been at
odds with Taylor on the issue.
“Continuing resistance from
outgoing Bush administration officials to the common sense strategy
of restarting the DDG 51 destroyer
class is not helpful to the Navy and
the nation,” Taylor said in his
statement, without directly naming
Young. “The shipbuilding plan
needs less meddling, not more.”
In his Jan. 26 memo, Young,
who served under President George
W. Bush but is expected to stay on
until the Obama administration
nominates his successor, suggested
placing the Future Surface Combatant (FSC) now planned by the
Navy under the DDG 1000 program until the service decides on a
design for the ship.
