Plan to fund Ohio replacement submarine reaches tipping point.

• Author: Harper, Jon
• Position: Cover story

* Political drama surrounds the Navy's Ohio replacement submarine, as the service tries to secure funding for its highest priority program.

Much hangs on the outcome of the high stakes budget battle playing out in Washington, D.C., which will shape the future of Navy shipbuilding and potentially have major effects on the other services and the industrial base.

A key issue in question is how to pay for the next generation of ballistic missile submarines--known as the SSBN(X) or the Ohio replacement--which the Navy says are needed to replace the aging Ohio-class vessels currently in service.

"The Navy is going to buy the Ohio replacement," said Bryan Clark, a naval expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "The nation is not going to accept the Navy not building a new ballistic missile submarine."

Ballistic missile submarines--nicknamed "boomers"--are the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear deterrent. Moving stealthily undersea, they are considered the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad. By 2018, when the U.S. military adjusts to the terms of the New START treaty, submarines will carry about 70 percent of America's deployed nuclear arsenal, according to Navy officials.

But the Ohio-class boats that carry the missiles will begin reaching the end of their service lives in 2027, with the final one scheduled to retire in 2040. The Navy hopes to start procuring the Ohio replacement in 2021, and ultimately buy 12 of them to replace the 14 Ohio-class ships.

But building a dozen SSBN(X)s will be enormously expensive. In a March report, the Government Accountability Office estimated the total cost of the Ohio replacement to be $96 billion. In December the Congressional Budget Office came up with an even higher estimate, putting the total price tag at $102 billion to $107 billion, depending on R&D expenditures.

The Navy is expected to spend about $10 billion over the next five years on development and advance procurement even before the first ship is built, according to the Pentagon's future years defense program.

Navy officials have rejected suggestions that the service Ohio-class submarine USS Alaska (SSBN 732) NAVY could build fewer than 12 Ohio replacements in order to save money.

"Anything below the current authorized number of boats for the Ohio replacement will prevent us from meeting our national commitment requirements. We simply can't do it," Vice Adm. Terry Benedict, the Navy's director of strategic systems programs, said at a breakfast discussion in Washington, D.C., in June.

Defense analysts said that no consideration is being given to nixing the SSBN(X), despite its price. Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said Congress supports the idea of building a new class of...