Lawmaker: New amphibious ships should be nuclear

House Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor, D-Miss., who has insisted that the Navy's next generation of cruisers be nuclear powered, said Tuesday that future amphibious vessels also should go nuclear.

Taylor also repeated his demand that the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, which has been plagued by design problems and soaring cost, be redesigned to make it more resistant to mines and improvised explosive devices.

Both of those suggestions are opposed by the two naval services.

Taylor and Seapower Subcommittee ranking member Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., led a successful effort to put language in the fiscal 2008 defense authorization act requiring that future cruisers and destroyers be nuclear powered. That language was expected to affect initially the proposed next generation air- and missile-defense cruisers, known as CG(X). Design contracts for CG(X) could be awarded in the next year.

But in a speech to a forum sponsored by Aviation Week, Taylor said the LPD-17, or San Antonio-class of amphibious ships, should be added to that requirement. "I want to see LPD, and anything else that makes sense, be nuclear powered," he said. He later told reporters that the larger helicopter-transporting amphibious assault ships also should be nuclear powered.

Although every U.S. submarine and aircraft carrier built over nearly half a century has been nuclear powered, the Navy has opposed putting nuclear reactors in its surface ships because of the substantially higher construction cost and the added expense in training crew members to operate them.

But Taylor argued that the rapidly rising cost of oil to fuel conventionally powered ships, the increased operational effectiveness of ships that do not need to be refueled at sea and the reduction in U.S. dependence on foreign oil more than offset the added construction costs. Nuclear reactors also provide vast amounts of electricity to power combat systems and the proposed electro-magnetic rail gun, he said.

Only two U.S. shipbuilders can produce nuclear-powered vessels. None of the shipyards in Mississippi that build Navy vessels are able to handle nuclear ships.

Taylor, who was one of the most vigorous proponents of the Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicles that were rushed into production to counter the IED threat in Iraq, said he would insist that the Marines build their fighting vehicles with the "V" shaped bottom that helps MRAPs resist the blast from the buried explosives.

While praising the proposed amphibious troop transport for its 25-knot water speed, Taylor said the flat bottom makes it vulnerable to IEDs, which have caused the majority of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

"This is personal. We don't need any more people losing limbs," he said.

The Marines argue that the flat bottom is necessary for the EFV to skim over the water at high speed. Current generation of amphibious vehicles can only go about seven knots in the water.

Gen. James Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, told the same forum later that the EFV's water speed was essential because the availability of anti-ship missiles means that the Navy would not take its amphibious ships closer than 25 miles from a hostile shore, making the current amphibious vehicles unusable.

Taylor also told the forum that he would try to increase the number of new ships to be funded in the fiscal 2009 budget from the seven President Bush proposed to 10. One of the added ships would be a LPD-17, he said.