In an opening salvo on the U.S. Navy’s plans to decommission 24 ships, including the USS Fort Worth, U.S. Rep. Kay Granger made her opposition clear to Navy leaders Wednesday.
“Let me be clear about my view on this proposal,” the Republican from Fort Worth said of the Navy’s budget for fiscal year 2023 during a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee. “I do not support it.”
Granger is the ranking member of the full committee.
“Some of these ships, especially the littoral combat ships, are among the newest in the fleet,” she told the Navy secretary, the chief of naval operations and the commandant of the Marine Corps.
Granger’s presence alone sent a message of how important the issue is to her, since as the ranking member she has the prerogative of participating in hearings of the panel’s 12 subcommittees.
The Navy is proposing to scrap nine of the Freedom-class littoral combat ships, which includes the USS Fort Worth, because they are costly to maintain and are not, officials say, capable of performing critical anti-submarine warfare.
But Granger, who is the USS Fort Worth’s sponsor, blocked the Navy from decommissioning it and two other LCSs in March in the government’s annual spending bill.
The Navy needs a waiver from Congress to decommission ships that are not at the end of their service life. The USS Fort Worth was built just 10 years ago by a team led by Lockheed Martin at a cost of $400 million. Its service life was expected to be 25 years. The ship is the oldest targeted for decommissioning — the USS St. Louis was commissioned in 2020.
And the ships are still being produced with the USS Minneapolis-St. Paul, a Freedom-class LCS, scheduled to be commissioned Saturday in Duluth.
The Navy, however, continues to target the older Freedom-class vessels. In the budget announced at the end of March for the next fiscal year, the Navy increased the number of LCSs it wants to decommission to nine from four. There is also a variant of the LCS known as the Independence class, but those ships are not being targeted.
“If the Navy expects Congress to support its vision for its fleet, it must do a better job managing the inventory it has. We will not stand idly by as valuable taxpayer funds are wasted,” Granger said.
The Navy leaders responded that the LCS, designed when there was a threat of piracy on the high seas to be speedy and able to move into shallow waters, were not practical against ramped up sea power from Russian and Chinese forces. “Littoral” means close to shore.
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said that “with regard to LCS, the particular problem we’re facing is with the ASW (anti-submarine warfare) module, these ships were designed and planned over 15 years ago with a different threat, so when we look at the threat that we face today in the Indo-Pacific, it becomes particularly challenging for those ships to contribute significantly to that high-end fight.”
Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, said that the decision to scrap the Freedom-class ships came about after determining how to have “the most lethal, capable, ready Navy we can within the budget that we have.”
“We stratified our platform and LCS fell at the bottom of that stratification,” he said. Much of the testing of the anti-submarine warfare module, said Gilday, was done on the USS Fort Worth. “That helped us make that determination that we shouldn’t put another dollar against that system because it wouldn’t pan out against high-end Russian and Chinese threats.”
Several lawmakers also said they were concerned about decommissioning so many ships at a time of global threats, including the subcommittee chair, Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., and Republicans Ken Calvert of California, who is the ranking member of the subcommittee; Tom Cole of Oklahoma; and Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida,
McCollum wanted to know about studies to convert or modify the speedy littoral combat ships for other functions. Diaz-Balart brought up diverting them for drug interdiction in Florida with the Coast Guard.
“My God, if there’s a place where they could really be useful, it’s in the Western Hemisphere intercepting these drugs,” said Diaz-Balart of the fentanyl crisis.
Del Toro said that he was traveling to Florida on Thursday to the United States Southern Command, which is made up of the unified military services, “to talk about this very issue.”
The defense panel is expected to vote on a funding bill later this summer.
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