Navy Ohio Replacement (SSBN[X]) Ballistic Missile Submarine Program: Background and Issues for Congress

Ronald O'Rourke
Specialist in Naval Affairs

The Navy’s proposed FY2013 budget requests $564.9 million for continued research and development work on the Ohio replacement program (ORP), a program to design and build a new class of 12 ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) to replace the Navy’s current force of 14 Ohioclass SSBNs. The Ohio replacement program is also known as the SSBN(X) program.

Under the Navy’s FY2012 budget, the first Ohio replacement boat was scheduled to be procured in FY2019, and Ohio replacement boats were to enter service on a schedule that would maintain the Navy’s SSBN force at 12 boats. The Navy’s proposed FY2013 budget defers the procurement of the first Ohio replacement boat by two years, to FY2021. As a result of this deferment, the Navy’s SSBN force will drop to 11 or 10 boats for the period FY2029-FY2041.

The Navy in 2011 estimated the average procurement cost of boats 2 through 12 in the Ohio replacement program at $5.6 billion each in FY2010 dollars, and is working to reduce that figure to a target of $4.9 billion each in FY2010 dollars. Even with this cost-reduction effort, observers are concerned about the impact the Ohio replacement program will have on the Navy’s ability to procure other types of ships at desired rates in the 2020s and early 2030s.

Potential oversight issues for Congress for the Ohio replacement program include the following:

• the reasons for deferring the start of SSBN(X) procurement by two years, to FY2021, the cost and operational impact of this decision, and whether it would be feasible and cost effective to restore the start of procurement to FY2019, as planned under the FY2012 budget; 
• the plan to design the SSBN(X) with 16 SLBM tubes rather than 20; 
• the likelihood that the Navy will be able to reduce the average procurement cost of boats 2-12 in the program to the target figure of $4.9 billion each in FY2010 dollars; 
• the accuracy of the Navy’s estimate of the procurement cost of each SSBN(X); 
• the prospective affordability of the Ohio replacement program and its potential impact on funding available for other Navy shipbuilding programs; and 
• the question of which shipyard or shipyards will build SSBN(X)s. 

This report focuses on the Ohio replacement program as a Navy shipbuilding program. CRS Report RL33640, U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background, Developments, and Issues, by Amy F. Woolf, discusses the SSBN(X) as an element of future U.S. strategic nuclear forces in the context of strategic nuclear arms control agreements.


Date of Report: March 27, 2013
Number of Pages: 45
Order Number: R41129
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Navy Nuclear Aircraft Carrier (CVN) Homeporting at Mayport: Background and Issues for Congress

Ronald O'Rourke
Specialist in Naval Affairs

The Navy’s proposed FY2013 budget defers the Navy’s plan to homeport a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier (CVN) at Mayport, FL. The Navy’s proposed FY2013 budget and the FY2013- FY2017 Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP) contain no funding for Military Construction (MilCon) projects required to homeport a CVN at Mayport. The Navy states: “Although the FY 2013 budget does not contain a construction project supporting the homeporting of a CVN in Mayport, FL, the Department [of the Navy] is committed to the requirement and policy to strategically disperse CVNs on each coast. This is a deferral at this time due to fiscal constraints.”

The Navy’s Atlantic Fleet CVNs are all homeported at Norfolk, VA. The Navy wants to establish a second Atlantic Fleet CVN home port by homeporting a CVN at Mayport. Prior to the submission of the FY2013 budget, Navy plans called for having Mayport ready to homeport a CVN in 2019. Transferring a CVN from Norfolk to Mayport would shift from Norfolk to Mayport the local economic activity associated with homeporting a CVN, which some sources estimate as being worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

The Navy’s desire to homeport a CVN at Mayport is an issue of strong interest to certain Members of Congress from Florida and Virginia. Certain Members of Congress from Florida have expressed support for the Navy’s desire to homeport a CVN at Mayport, arguing (as have DOD and the Navy) that the benefits in terms of mitigating risks to the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet CVNs are worth the costs associated with moving a CVN to Mayport. Certain Members of Congress from Virginia have expressed skepticism regarding, or opposition to, the Navy’s desire to homeport a CVN at Mayport, arguing that the benefits in terms of mitigating risks to the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet CVNs are questionable or uncertain, and that the funding needed to implement the proposal could achieve greater benefits if it were spent on other Navy priorities.


Date of Report: March 27, 2013
Number of Pages: 75
Order Number: R40248
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Kings and Vikings

Since the early 1990s an important literature on the causes and intensity of conflict has emerged. Initiated by seminal work of Hirshleifer (1991, 1995) and Grossman (1991), several analysts have considered how rational agents allocate their endowments across productive and appropriative activities to maximize their payoffs. Since conflict, in various forms, has played a major role throughout human history – shaping the development trajectory of civilization – improving our understanding of the nature of conflict appears extremely useful.   A slightly awkward feature of the conflict literature is its focus on static modeling. While, arguably, there are examples where opponents contest a prize during one instant and return to their usual business, there are many other cases where the nature of conflict evolves over time. Conflicts may evolve because technologies and relative prices change due to some endogenous or exogenous process, or because the incentives to behave in a certain fashion are subject to change. In this book we adopt the latter perspective, and discuss the incentives for agents to agglomerate into larger groups. Agglomeration may enable parties to better defend themselves from aggressors, or to better exploit their weaker neighbors. The result is what can be called a theory of competitive agglomeration.   Our approach was motivated by the insight that dealing with issues of provision of defense and exploitation of neighbors was one of the primary reasons for governments and larger political groups to form in the first place. In this way, our theory contributes to the literature on the optimal size of political jurisdictions, providing an alternative angle to explain the development of nation states. Like these theories, scale economies are at the heart of our story, and optimal nation size is determined by balancing benefits and costs of increasing the jurisdiction. Unlike other theories, however, our dynamic theory of agglomeration springs directly from the nature of the conflict technology, and not from an assumption about fixed costs in the provision of certain public goods. In fact, we show that the degree of agglomeration – a measure of the optimal size of a jurisdiction – depends upon the technology by which defenders and invaders interact. In essence we aim to provide a natural link between two strands of literature – analytical work on the size of nations and on arms races

While we hope our theory is useful in understanding the basic forces driving agglomeration in the face of conflict in a general setting, we shall discuss our theory in terms of a particularly dramatic episode in history: the era of the Viking invasions. The Viking invasions are an interesting and in many ways ideal episode within which to study agglomeration: only through effectively forming larger groups could European settlements deal with Viking raids, while at the same time Viking invasions evolved over time from small, disorganized attacks into large, organized invasions. Our theory also allows us to consider various hypotheses as to how the invasions got started in the first place. In this paper we focus on these early days and on the development towards the high of the Viking invasions. While we don’t analyze explicitly the end of the Viking era, the model can be used to shed some light on this matter as well.

The book is organized as follows. In section II we provide a short history of the Vikings, fleshing out some of the more pertinent stylized facts and honing in on some of the gruesome details. Section III introduces notation and sketches the bare bones of the basic model. In section IV we consider the relatively easy case where villages can ‘agglomerate’ in coalitions to improve their oomph in contests, but where the level of their contribution to the coalition is fixed. In section V we allow villages to optimally choose their contribution. This allows u to trace out the full dynamic system, and analyze its properties.


Date of Report: April 1, 2013
Number of Pages: 29
Order Number: G1318
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African Americans and the United States Military

In an era where Barack Obama serves as the Commander-in-Chief and the military is one of the most racially integrated institutions in American society, it is worth considering as one reads Defiance that things were not always so. The two epigraphs of this essay serve as bookends to the history of African Americans in relation to American patriotism and the nation’s armed forces from the Revolution through the Vietnam era. Phyllis Wheatley, the literate slave of a prominent Boston family, offered poetic support for American grievances against the colonial regime of taxation using her own actual state of enslavement as a way of proving her right to protest against a fiscal regime that many Bostonians and others referred to as metaphorical slavery. This condition of being both a patriot and, in many cases, at best a second-class citizen marks the experience of many African Americans in uniform until the integration of US armed forces under President Truman. The quotation from Private Allen Jones serves as a reminder that even after integration and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, life in an officially colorblind military (or country, for that matter) did not and does not guarantee equable treatment before the law, whether that law is civil or the Uniform Code of Military Justice.


Date of Report: March 21, 2013
Number of Pages: 18
Order Number: G1317
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Operation Rolling Thunder: Political Decision-making that Committed the United States to the Vietnam War

The assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem on November 1, 1963, left a leadership void in Saigon that was never filled. Heads of state went through Saigon like a revolving door, yet none of them were able to successfully lead and govern the people of South Vietnam.

On the other side of the globe, President of the United States John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. While the U.S. had a line of succession, President Johnson was relatively new to the Vietnam situation. Even though Johnson was new, he still had Kennedy’s cabinet and advisers to aid his decisions. Despite this, by early 1964 two new leaders, Nguyen Khanh and Lyndon Johnson sought a solution to the decades long struggle in Vietnam.

President Johnson inherited a three-front war in Vietnam. One front was North Vietnamese support of the Viet Cong (VC) insurgency in South Vietnam, and Johnson had to stop this support in order to defeat the VC. The insurgency itself constituted another front that had to be defeated in order to maintain a free and independent South Vietnam. The third overarching front was the creation of a stable and legitimate government in Saigon capable of governing the people of South Vietnam. The question for his administration was on which of these aspects to focus. Before Johnson could make that decision, he first had to decide if the U.S. should continue to aid Saigon; therefore, he had three options: leave Vietnam, continue in an advisory role, or escalate U.S. involvement.

The political and military situations in Vietnam deteriorated to such a point through 1964-1965 that by February 1965 there were no good choices left from which President Johnson could choose. Johnson desired for there to be a stable South Vietnamese government before he committed U.S. forces to its defense; however, no such government emerged. The administration was unwilling to risk U.S. prestige, resources, and lives unless they were confident South Vietnam could succeed without U.S. support. Because of the instability in South Vietnam as well as the perceived risk of communist aggression, President Johnson decided that escalatory military actions would be limited and gradual. Therefore, President Johnson made the least bad decision he could in February 1965 by initiating Operation ROLLING THUNDER and committing the United States to the Vietnam War.


Date of Report: March 20, 2013
Number of Pages: 49
Order Number: G1316
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