US Navy Plans To Buy 264 Ships For $500 Billion Over 30 Years

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has submitted the Navy's 2015 shipbuilding plan, which covers fiscal years 2015 to 2044, to the Congress in July 2014, Congressional Budget Office said in a report.

The Navy estimates that buying the new ships specified in the 2015 plan would cost $500 billion over 30 years, or an average of $16.7 billion per year—slightly less than the costs of the 2014.

The total costs of carrying out the 2015 plan—an average of about $21 billion in 2014 dollars per year over the next 30 years—would be one-third higher than the funding amounts that the Navy has received in recent decades, the CBO estimates.

The Navy’s 2015 shipbuilding plan is very similar, but not identical, to its 2014 plan with respect to the Navy’s total inventory goal for battle force ships, the number and types of ships the Navy would purchase, and the proposed funding to implement the plans.

The Navy’s 2015 shipbuilding plan states that the service’s overall inventory goal (in military parlance, its requirement) is 306 battle force ships. The Navy’s shipbuilding plan falls short of meeting the service’s inventory goals for some types of ships in some years, although generally the shortfalls are smaller than in previous years’ plans.

Under the 2015 plan, the Navy would buy a total of 264 ships over the 2015–2044 period: 218 combat ships and 46 combat logistics and support ships. Given the rate at which the Navy plans to retire ships from the fleet, that construction plan would not achieve a fleet equal to the inventory goal of 306 ships until 2019 under new rules for counting ships that the Navy implemented this year or until 2022 under the old counting rules.