Spencer said the use of unmanned technologies could offset some of the ships the U.S. Navy said it needed in its recent force structure assessment that set the bar for its ship count at 355.

That answer raised alarms in some circles where building a 355-ship Navy is a high priority. Spencer’s backpedaling on the Navy’s own stated goal of 355 ships was a similar dance to the one performed by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis when pressed in June about the larger fleet.

Mattis has prioritized filling readiness gaps in the current fleet over building ships, but some members of Congress and Navy observers believe Spencer should throw his whole weight behind shipbuilding, including with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va.

“[Secretary-select Spencer’s] comments the other day in the SASC, I think, need some refinement,” Wittman said. “I think being ambivalent about 355 ships is not where the SecNav needs to be. … He has too much of the Washington disease of being soft — well, 350 may be a good number, and we’re going to do all this other stuff, these complimentary pieces.”

“I think you need to be strong and unambivalent as a signal to industry, as a signal to our adversaries that this is where we’re going to go. … Hopefully, as time comes along, he will see things from that perspective.”

Capabilities vs. Capacity

The debate over capacity — the number of ships available to perform missions — versus capability, or how effective the weapons and systems on those ships are, is a carry-over from the Obama administration. During the waning days of the last administration, the debate between Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus turned downright ugly.

Prior to leaving office, Carter ordered Mabus to cut $17 billion from the Navy’s budget over the five-year plan in the fiscal year 2017 budget and invest in more lethal weapons over shipbuilding. Mabus defied the order and sent up a budget that added money to the shipbuilding budget. Mabus had long argued that shipbuilding cuts were the least reversible thing the Navy could do with its budget.

Since taking office, Mattis has been focused on filling readiness gaps and getting the fleet the country already has back to peak readiness. Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the Navy needs a larger fleet but that the readiness deficit created by years of overuse and budget cuts had to be addressed first.

“The challenge is that we’re in a position right now where we’ve got to get the fleet back to sea that we have now,” Mattis said. “We’re trying to address this, trying to eat this elephant one bite at a time.”

Getting to a larger fleet would require annual budget growth of about 5 percent, Mattis told the members, which under the Budget Control Act would be impossible.

Wittman, along with his Senate seapower counterpart, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., have been vocal advocates for the 355-ship Navy, recently introducing a bill that makes it national policy to maintain a 355-ship Navy.

The Securing the Homeland by Increasing our Power on the Seas Act, known as the SHIPS Act, was introduced in June and is still in the committee.

To some observers, the focus on readiness is misplaced and not aligned with the promises made by candidate Trump, who pledged to build a 350-ship Navy.

“I think this 350-ship Navy is in desperate trouble,” said Bryan McGrath, a retired destroyer skipper and consultant with The FerryBridge Group. “Everyone has to first understand that we are 32 ships short of the Obama administration’s goal of 308 ships. And just getting there in the budget environment that prevails in Washington is going to be a hard slog.”

For McGrath, a longtime advocate for a larger fleet who contributed to one of the force structure assessments the Navy used to set the 355-ship goal, Spencer’s backpedaling was disappointing.

“I think it was unimpressive,” McGrath said. “I think his testimony did not convince me that Mr. Spencer understands the value of sea power to this country’s security and prosperity.”

“When you blithely dismiss the political notion of a 350-ship Navy and say it could be 300 with some unmanned capabilities, you are not doing the job of the secretary of the Navy. The job of the secretary of the Navy is to ensure that everyone knows why we have the Navy, what it does for our security and prosperity and how underinvesting in that Navy is disproportionately bad for the country.”

Joe Gould in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

In addition, General Zhang Youxia, a member of China’s Central Military Commission and head of its Equipment Development Department, attended the ceremony. He was joined by leaders of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN, as well as those from the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense at the ceremony.

The MND release listed the ship’s displacement at 10,000 tons but did not provide further details, although satellite imagery of the ship being built suggests that it will be between 175 and 180 meters long with a beam of approximately 20 meters.

Photos of the ceremony released by the MND and Chinese state media also suggest the Type 055 will be fitted with a bow-mounted sonar and a 64-cell vertical launch system, or VLS, for surface to air, anti-ship and cruise missiles in the forward section of the ship behind the 130mm dual-purpose gun. This ship will also include a set of VLS aft that will likely bring the total number of VLS cells carried by the ship to between 112 and 128 cells.

The Type 055 also features multifunction phased array radar similar to that on China’s Type 052D destroyers and the U.S. Navy’s AEGIS system. More sensors are carried within an integrated mast on the superstructure, while it is believed that there will be hangar facilities on board to carry two helicopters.

Although classified by the PLAN as a destroyer, a recent Pentagon report on Chinese military developments called the Type 055 a cruiser, assigning the code name Renhai-class to the type. Naval analysts told Defense News have also questioned the published displacement of 10,000 tons, believing it to be an under-estimate of the true figure.

It is anticipated that the first Type 055 will be commissioned into service in 2019, when it will be the premier surface combatant in the PLAN and is expected to be an integral part of China’s future carrier battle group alongside the smaller Type 052D destroyers and 054A frigates.

As Defense News has reported earlier, China is building further ships of the class at a rapid pace, with another hull already put together at Jiangnan-Changxing shipyard. In addition, commercial satellite imagery and aerial photographs indicate that preparations are being made for two further ships to be built at the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Company’s shipyard in northern China.

The pace of construction of the Type 055 is a stark contrast to its approach to the Type 052 destroyers, which were previously the PLAN’s most advanced ship types. A small number of Type 052 subclasses, known as the Type 052, 052B and 052C, were built and evaluated by the PLAN before the current 052D became the settled design. The pace reflects China’s increasing confidence in its advanced naval shipbuilding industry, having recently built everything from aircraft carriers to nuclear submarines as part of the country’s rapid naval modernization program.

Texas Republican Rep. Ted Poe has proposed a bill that would take away Pakistan’s status as a major non-NATO ally, or MNNA. The move comes amid multiple reports the Trump administration will press Islamabad to crack down on Pakistan-based militants like the Haqqani network, which launched attacks in Afghanistan.

“Pakistan must be held accountable for the American blood on its hands,” Poe said while introducing the bill on Thursday. “For years, Pakistan has acted as a Benedict Arnold ally of the United States. From harboring Osama bin Laden to backing the Taliban, Pakistan has stubbornly refused to go after, in any meaningful way, terrorists that actively seek to harm opposing ideologies.”

Poe said the U.S. must make a clean break with Pakistan or at least stop providing it with sophisticated weaponry and treating it like a close ally.

Poe chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade Subcommittee, and he has offered similar legislation several times over several years. This bill, co-sponsored with Rep. Rick Nolan, D-Minn., is more likely to make a statement than to become reality, and it faces a long legislative road if the administration doesn’t beat it to the punch.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has hinted the U.S. strategy review for Afghanistan due in mid-July will include a shift on Pakistan. He told Congress last week the strategy would be included in “a regional approach.”

But Pakistan’s embassy in Washington warned against “scapegoating” to explain the stalemate in Afghanistan, pointing instead to Afghanistan’s own troubled internal dynamics.

“Singling out Pakistan and pinning the entire blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan is neither fair nor accurate, nor is it borne out by the ground realities,” said Abid Saeed, press minister at the embassy, told Reuters. 

In 2004, President George W. Bush granted Pakistan MNNA status in an effort to get Pakistan to help the United States fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

That status makes it eligible for priority delivery of defense material, an expedited arms sale process and a U.S. loan guarantee program that backs up loans issued by private banks to finance arms exports. It can also stockpile U.S. military hardware, participate in defense research and development programs and be sold more sophisticated weaponry.

Pakistan has since become one of the leading recipients of U.S. foreign assistance, as Congress appropriated more than $18 billion in aid between 2002 and 2015, including $7.6 billion in security-related aid.

According to data compiled by the Center for International Policy, Congress was notified in 2014 of more than $600 million in major arms sales to Pakistan, including $200 million in Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles and GRC43M cutters worth $350 million. In 2015, there was nearly $1 billion in U.S. sales to Pakistan, including Viper attack helicopters and Hellfire missiles. The U.S. subsidized some of this under foreign military financing funds.

The powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was instrumental in blocking U.S. subsidies for the $700 million sale of eight F-16 Block 52 fighter jets to Pakistan in 2016. He also fended off efforts to scuttle the sale completely.

Corker, on Wednesday, declined to comment on the idea of changing Pakistan’s status but said he hoped the Trump administration would take a tougher stand toward Pakistan over its alleged support of the Haqqani network.

“We have spent billion and billions and billions of tax-payer dollars toward their country, and I’m certainly unsatisfied,” Corker said. “The No. 1 threat to American soldiers is the Haqqani network, and Pakistan allows it to have safe haven in their country.” 

Email:   jgould@defensenews.com         
Twitter:   @reporterjoe     

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International concern is mounting over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. The North conducted two nuclear test explosions last year, the latest in September. Predicting nuclear tests is notoriously difficult because the tests are conducted underground.

The other stations mentioned by Xiao would be situated on features in the Paracel island group that China has controlled since seizing parts of it away from Vietnam in 1974.

China’s construction and land reclamation work in the South China Sea have drawn strong criticism from the U.S. and others, who accuse Beijing of further militarizing the region and altering geography to bolster its claims. China says the seven man-made islands in the disputed Spratly group, which it has equipped with airstrips and military installations, are mainly for civilian purposes and to boost safety for fishing and maritime trade.

Prior to the announcement, South China Sea tensions had eased somewhat since Beijing erupted in fury last year after a Hague-based arbitration tribunal ruled on a case filed by the Philippines. The verdict invalidated China’s sweeping territorial claims and determining that China violated the rights of Filipinos to fish at Scarborough Shoal.

Photo Credit: Maps4News/HERE via AP

China has since allowed Filipino fishermen to return to the shoal following Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s calls for closer ties between the countries, but it does not recognize the tribunal’s ruling as valid and insists it has historical claims to almost the entire South China Sea, through which an estimated $5 trillion in global trade passes each year.

Scarborough has no proper land mass and any structure on it would likely have to be built on stilts. The shoal forms a triangle-shaped lagoon of rocks and reefs running for 46 kilometers, with its highest point just about 6 feet above water at high tide. Known in Chinese as Huangyan Island, it lies about 120 miles west of the main Philippine island of Luzon, and about 370 miles southeast of China.

U.S. diplomats have said privately that reclamation work on the shoal would be seen as crossing a red line because of its proximity to the main Philippine islands and the threat it could pose to U.S. and Filipino military assets.

During his Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson compared China’s island-building and military deployments to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and suggested China’s access to the islands should not be allowed. The U.S. says China has reclaimed more than 3,200 acres of land in the area.

The topic is likely to be high on the agenda when Tillerson visits Beijing for talks with top officials on Saturday and Sunday.

Meanwhile, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang was visiting the Philippines, just days after Duterte said Monday that he had told the military to assert Philippine ownership of a large ocean region off the country’s northeastern coast where Chinese survey ships were spotted last year, a discovery that alarmed Philippine defense officials.

China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei have long contested ownership of the South China Sea, which straddles one of the world’s busiest sea lanes and is believed to sit atop vast deposits of oil and gas.

Also this week, the commander in chief of China’s navy, Vice Adm. Shen Jinlong, noted improving relations in a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart, Rear Adm. Pham Hoai Nam, in Beijing.

China and Vietnam have had long-running territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Tensions spiked in 2014 after China parked an oil rig near Vietnam’s central coast, sparking mass protests in Vietnam.

The two navies and their countries should “together play a positive role in maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea,” Shen was quoted as saying by China’s Ministry of National Defense.

White House officials say they plan to increase the base defense budget by $54 billion to $603 billion by slashing domestic spending and foreign aid. That netted a swift rebuke from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and his Senate counterpart, Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who have each proposed a $640 billion base budget and argue this is a meager $18 billion more than President Obama had planned.

McCain, in a statement, said the figure was, “a mere 3 percent above President Obama’s defense budget, which has left our military underfunded, undersized, and unready to confront threats to our national security… With a world on fire, America cannot secure peace through strength with just 3 percent more than President Obama’s budget. We can and must do better.”

The comments came as White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told reporters Monday the budget blueprint represents President Trump’s priorities, including the military, the nuclear arsenal and border security  –  without adding to the 2018 deficit. The non-defense side of the budget will be $462 billion, Mulvaney said. 

“We are taking his words and turning them into policies and dollars,” he said. “It reduces money to other nations, eliminates duplicative programs and eliminates programs that just don’t work.”

Asked how the defense top-line would carry forward Trump’s pledge to rebuild the military, Mulvaney said it was too soon to say. The Defense Department would over the next two weeks craft its budget to the top-line provided by the White House. The White House will issue a fuller budget proposal in early May.

Big questions about the plan remain, including whether that defense money would be just for the Pentagon or for broader defense programs such as the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration; whether foreign aid and security assistance programs from the Department of State could be shifted over to DoD; or whether the money will flow into the Pentagon’s base budget or the Overseas Contingency Operations fund.

The biggest question of all — how a proposal that guts the non-defense budget would survive on Capitol Hill — suggests the White House has offered an opening negotiation position rather than a viable number. It’s a proposal sure to net a violent reaction from Senate Democrats, who have in recent years asked that defense increases be matched dollar-for-dollar on the non-defense side.

Democrats quickly signaled Monday they would oppose the plan. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement, “This budget proposal is a reflection of exactly who this president is and what today’s Republican Party believes in: helping the wealthy and special interests while putting further burdens on the middle class and those struggling to get there.”

Squeezing Trump and Mulvaney from the opposite side of the aisle, in the lower chamber, Thornberry said, “we can and should do more” for defense.

“While we cannot repair all of the damage done by those cuts in a single year, we can and should do more than this level of funding will allow,” Thornberry said in a statement. “The administration will have to make clear which problems facing our military they are choosing not to fix. We cannot make repairing and rebuilding our military conditional on fixing our budget problems or on cutting other spending.”

Katherine Blakeley, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says a number of questions need to be addressed before the real details of the budget plan can be assessed. But one thing is clear, she said – that this plan is designed to be “politically untenable for the Democrats while trying to be as favorable as possible for the Republicans.”

Or as Benjamin Friedman of the CATO Institute put it, “This plan won’t happen because Democrats will block it.”

Since the imposition of the budget caps, Democrats have fought to maintain a one-for-one trade between defense spending and domestic spending. That was easier when they had top cover from President Barack Obama, but could prove more challenging with the Trump White House hammering Democrats for holding down on defense levels.

Congress would not only need to pass a 2018 budget resolution, which could pass with Republican alone, but a new law to raise the caps to allow the White House’s proposal. That would require Democratic votes.

“Republicans need 60 Senate votes to overturn the BCA cap for next year,” Friedman said. “I believe Schumer can keep enough of Democrats in line around the idea that an increase in defense must be matched by an increase in non-defense discretionary to stop this.”

Instead, he predicts the two parties will settle on a raising of the budget caps for both defense and non-defense spending, with an influx of cash into OCO.

Blakeley also notes that, by putting its marker for fiscal 2018 down now, the administration is setting up the still-unsettled fiscal 2017 appropriations discussion as a proxy war. The government is currently operating under a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, which expires at the end of April. 

Mackenzie Eaglen, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said of Democrats, “This will really irk them and there’s no reason for them not to go all in on this political battle. Cutting programs like Head Start and National Endowment for the Arts are not even popular among many Republicans.”

Because the plans pays for defense increases through the non-defense side and not deficit spending, the proposal is a nod at fiscal conservatives in Congress. Mulvaney was one of them before he left Congress to join the White House.

“Nobody wants to increase overall spending, and the only way you can do that without huge earth-shaking debates is by reducing other discretionary spending,” said James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There is a rational limit to how much you can do that.”

It is also a nod toward defense hawks. Carafano described the White House’s number Monday as a “down payment” on the defense build-up Trump has repeatedly promised.

“The important thing to me is this is a clear statement of recognition that we are heading towards a hollow force,” Carafano said. “There’s not just a readiness crisis, there’s enormous modernization challenges, and you have trouble maintaining [operational] tempo. That’s the text book definition of a force that’s heading to hollow.”