Forward Observer: Bartlett's Not-So-Familiar Quotations

Congress now has a farmer, inventor, physiologist, professor, businessman, engineer and politician trying to save the Navy from itself. And all these backgrounds are embodied in one 79-year-old man, House Armed Services Projection Forces Subcommittee Chairman Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md.

He knows, and the competing Navy tribes (aviators, submariners, surface warfare officers) and their allies in Congress know, that he is rowing against a tide that has swept away many other would-be reformers over the last 50 years. The tide Bartlett is up against is a David Farragut-like order from Navy leaders -- "Damn the cost, full speed ahead with super ships and submarines."

The Pentagon's latest estimate of weapons costs documents this mindset. Counting research and development dollars, the Pentagon puts these price tags on the Navy's new ships: $12 billion for each CVN 21 aircraft carrier; $3.6 billion for the DDX destroyer; $3 billion for the SSN 774 Virginia class submarine, and $850 million for the supposedly simple Littoral Combat Ship for fighting enemy vessels in the shallows.

Bartlett, who took over the subcommittee in 2003, is still suffering from sticker shock. He believes the Navy is not only pricing itself out of a fleet large enough to cover the world's hotspots but also is making it easy for the bad guys to sink it by having so few ships.

This fresh mind, unfettered by any shipyards in his congressional district and with the political power to force the secretary of Defense and admirals to listen to him, is worried about what he sees happening.

The Navy is buying "platforms so big, so expensive and so few," he told me, "that a peer nation" could spend six months to learn with satellites and other detection techniques exactly where the ships were deployed. With the weapons we have today," Bartlett said, "I would not be very sanguine about how many of our major assets would be available to us the next morning."

Even with President's Bush expensive defense budgets there is not enough money to build the Navy up from its current 281 ships to the 313 the service is seeking, the chairman warned.

The Navy's annual shipbuilding budget "is roughly $10 billion," he noted, which is only half the money analysts estimate the service needs to reach and maintain a Navy of that size. Even Adm. Vern Clark, when he was chief of naval operations, told Congress that "'if costs keep going up, we'll soon have a Navy with one airplane, one submarine, one ship," Bartlett recalled."

Rising costs have put the Navy in the same kind of procurement "death spiral" that imperils the Air Force: weapons that cost so much that too few of them can be bought to do the tasks at hand.

So what is the new chairman going to do about the Navy's problem?

Bartlett, whose out-of-the-box thinking as a civilian inspired inventions and patents, said he will not try to pass new laws. Instead, he sees his mission as forcing new thinking on the defense establishment.

For one thing, he wants a blue ribbon committee of experts named to recommend how to make shipyards efficient, even if it means letting some of them go out of business. He wants the commission's recommendations to be put to an up-or-down vote in Congress, as is the case with recommended base closings, rather than see them debated to death.

He also wants to force new looks at building smaller and cheaper aircraft carriers; manning ships with smaller crews through automation; building small, unmanned ships that could be operated in distant waters by crews sitting at consoles in the United States, as is done today with Predator drone aircraft in Afghanistan and Iraq; arming some ships one way and other ships another rather than packing every conceivable system into one Cadillac of a ship.

"I've been asking myself the question that since you can only be in one place at one time" no matter how expensive or fancy the ship, why does the Navy keep building super carriers? Thanks to precision weapons on its aircraft, he said, the Navy could get the same firepower as it did during the first Gulf war by building smaller aircraft carriers with fewer aircraft on deck.

"I don't see any justification for continuing to make these really, really large carriers that can only be in one place at one time," he said.

Bartlett's questions will put Navy leaders and their wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress at battle stations. His thinking will be healthy for Congress, the Pentagon and the public. But the Navy won't take the cheaper event, it seems to me after watching the struggles of other would be reformers for four decades, unless the president as commander-in-chief insists upon it.

Jimmy Carter was the last president to get the Navy and Congress to forego building a new carrier. But he got rolled by his successor, Ronald Reagan, and the Navy went back to building its super carrier.

But Bartlett chooses to be an optimist about inspiring change. When he took over as subcommittee chairman, "I didn't know what couldn't be done," he said. "Many times when you don't know what can't be done, you try to do it anyhow. So that's where I am."