Rep. Randy Forbes remains deeply concerned about the Navy’s plan to mothball seven cruisers (ostensibly temporarily) and about what he considers its too-modest ambitions for its new UCLASS drone – but language fixing those problems will have to wait till later in the legislative process, he told reporters this morning.
“I will tell you this, we will keep that carrier,” Forbes said at a Defense Writers’ Group breakfast. “You won’t see a mark coming out under my name that doesn’t have that carrier taken care of.”
What about the planes that go on the carrier, which the administration would also eliminate under a sequester-level budget? “The air wing worries me,” Forbes said. “We’re working on that too.”
“We’re still working on the cruisers,” he added, for which legislative language will likely come later in the HASC process. “It may be later even this week,” he said. While details are still being worked out after a key decision “last night,” Forbes told the assembled reporters, “I feel pretty comfortable we won’t go with the exact plan the Navy has.
As for the UCLASS, the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance and Strike drone, the Navy recently released a classified request for proposals with which Forbes and his staff are clearly dissatisfied. Forbes feels the Navy is putting too much emphasis on “surveillance” and not enough on the payload and survivability required for “strike.” So he intends to require Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to reconsider the Navy’s requirements – “there’s a lot of support within the department for this,” he said. While Forbes emphasized he doesn’t want to delay UCLASS, which he considers a high priority, he did say he may propose enforcing this mandate by “fencing” funding for UCLASS so the Navy can’t spend it until that relook happens.
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