The Navy is planning to build 12 ballistic missile submarines that are so pricey the service is facing a $60 billion shortfall between 2021 and 2035, yet many of the lawmakers overseeing the Navy appear to have no problem with that.
Despite congressionally mandated automatic cuts in fiscal 2013 that are squeezing operations and maintenance accounts and have prompted civilian furloughs — and facing the prospect of yet another sequester in fiscal 2014 — key oversight lawmakers simply say the extra money must be found.
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“You have a Navy living in a parallel universe hoping declining budgets go away and you also have a Navy in a budgetary war … between the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines for projected out-year resources,” said Gordon Adams, a defense budget expert at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “And they are talking to people who don’t do budgets — because they are talking to the Armed Services Committee. They don’t do budgets, they are advocates for their part of the DOD universe.”
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