Forbes Leads House Battle For Ohio Replacement Fund

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/06/forbes-leads-house-battle-for-ohio-replacement-fund/



UPDATE: Forbes’s amendment passed the House Wednesday night, by 321 votes to 111.

Forbes Leads House Battle For Ohio Replacement Fund
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on June 09, 2015 at 5:43 PM

WASHINGTON: Two powerful committees are headed for a rare House floor fight over a controversial fund to build new nuclear missile submarines.

Rep. Randy Forbes and Rep. Joe Courtney, the chairman and top Democrat of the House Armed Services subcommittee on seapower, are preparing to introduce an amendment to the defense appropriations bill to protect the National Sea-Based Deterrent Fund. The HASC created it to cover the extraordinary cost of replacing the Ohio-class sub — $80 billion to $92 billion depending on the estimate — but the appropriators consider it a fiscal gimmick. While the appropriations bill doesn’t dissolve the fund, it does forbid moving any money into it, rendering it a empty and useless shell.

We understand the appropriators and authorizers (HAC-D and HASC) tried to negotiate a deal. The talks fell apart and we are left with the coming floor fight. They were “trying to talk through any policy differences that we have, to try to resolve those without doing it on the floor,” Forbes told me this afternoon. “So far we haven’t seen that coming to fruition.”

HASC’s full committee chairman, Rep. Mac Thornberry, hasn’t given up hope yet. “Working with the appropriators, we’ll have to sort through these issues,” he told reporters on the Hill today. “I think a lot of folks, and I would put me in this camp, are concerned that the Ohio-class replacement is going to be so expensive that unless it has some kind of a separate sort of fund, it will crowd out all the other shipbuilding in the Navy…. That is why we put that separate fund in there the last two years, but we’ll have to work with them to see how the outcome is.”

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio-class_submarine

We currently have 18 Ohio-class Subs in service.

Virginia-class subs cost $7~$9 billion dollars a pop.

$82 billion / 18 = $5.1111111111 per sub.

Do you seriously believe that we can / will build a new class submarine for less than Virginia-class subs cost?