Bush plan would give Navy a sub, retire Kennedy

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By DALE EISMAN, The Virginian-Pilot
© February 7, 2006

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration outlined plans Monday to spend more than $500 billion on the military next year but proposed only a 2.2 percent pay increase for troops, the smallest raise since 1994, and called on military retirees to pay a larger share of their health care costs.

The Pentagon will need $439 billion for “peacetime” operations in 2007, according to the proposal. The administration plans to ask Congress for an additional $50 billion to cover the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its pursuit of terrorists around the world, a figure that probably will increase if insurgent attacks in Iraq continue at their current pace.

Wartime operations currently are costing just less than $7 billion per month, Pentagon Comptroller Tina Jonas said.

The budget proposal includes $127 billion for the Navy, a $4.4 billion increase from this year. It would finance construction of seven ships, including a submarine that would be built in part at Northrop Grumman’s Newport News shipyard, but sticks with an earlier Pentagon plan to delay work on a new aircraft carrier – another project for the local yard – until 2008.

Congress added $87 million to the 2006 budget to try to jump-start work on the carrier, called CVN-21, but Rear Adm. Stan Bozin, the Navy’s budget director, said the money came too late in the planning process .

The budget also reaffirms the Navy’s plan to retire the carrier John F. Kennedy this year, reducing the carrier fleet to 11, the lowest total in decades. Congress interceded last year to retain the Kennedy, but Navy officials say that at age 38, and in need of a major overhaul, the ship should be mothballed.

“We believe that we can fully support the nation’s requirement and direction with 11 carrier strike groups,” Bozin said. Operating the ship for five more years would cost the Navy more than

$1 billion, exclusive of repairs, Bozin said.

The Kennedy is based in Mayport, Fla. near Jacksonville. Its retirement could have major implications for Hampton Roads. Navy leaders have signaled their desire to shift a Norfolk-based flattop to Mayport once the Kennedy has departed. The Hampton Roads Planning District Commission estimates that would drain 3,000 jobs and an estimated $225 million annually from the local economy.

Bozin said the Navy expects 14 new ships, financed in past years, to enter the fleet in 2007, with 12 retiring. That would boost the total to 283 and halt a decline that began more than a decade ago. The service is to release a 30-year shipbuilding plan today that reportedly will call for a fleet of 313 ships.

Overall, the administration’s plan calls for a 7 percent increase in defense spending and begins what officials said will be a series of new investments in fighting “irregular wars,” such as the Iraq insurgency.

The administration wants to add 14,000 special operations troops, including a new force within the Marine Corps, and proposed a five-year, $760 million program to give cultural and foreign language instruction to more troops.

The budget also proposes a five-year, $11.6 billion investment in additional unstaffed aircraft, which U.S. forces in Iraq have found useful in tracking insurgent movements, and calls on the Navy to develop three squadrons – 36 boats – of river-going attack craft similar to the swift boats of the Vietnam War era.

The spending plan, including projected expenses for the war on terrorism, is the largest for the military since 1952, near the height of the Korean War, said Steven M. Kosiak, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Defense and homeland security are among the few growth areas in the administration’s spending proposals across the federal government. Some of those programs are growing only modestly or facing a budgetary ax .

The administration’s proposed 2.2 percent pay increase for service members is the smallest such increase since 1994. That year, President Clinton had asked for no pay raises, but Congress provided a 2.2 percent increase.

Officials confirmed Monday that the administration will try to stem the growth in the military’s health care costs by asking thousands of military retirees to pay more for health insurance .

Retiree groups, which have secured a variety of enhanced benefits on Capitol Hill in recent years, already are organizing to fight the higher fees, including a more than 200 percent increase in what retired officers younger than 65 pay for coverage under Tricare Prime, the military’s premium health plan.

The new fee of $700 per year for individual retired officers, or $1,400 for family coverage, still is far less than the retirees would pay for comparable coverage from civilian providers, said Dr. William Winkenwerder, the Pentagon’s top health official. Retired enlisted members would pay less than officers, though their premiums would roughly double, officials said.

Tricare premiums have not been adjusted since 1995. B ecause health care costs have been rising quickly, those premiums now cover only 12 percent of the military’s health care costs, officials said, down from 27 percent.

Jonas and Winkenwerder emphasized that the proposed increases do not cover active duty troops. They also do not apply to military retirees older than 65, who are eligible for coverage under Tricare for Life, a Medicare supplement.

Locally, the budget proposal also calls for cutting two popular homeland security grant programs that provided equipment and training to police and medical crews.

Funding for the Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention program and the Metropolitan Medical Response System could be shifted to other grant programs or could end up being restored, federal authorities said. That still left officials in Hampton Roads antsy .

Under the medical response system, 16 Hampton Roads communities joined together to develop a regional plan to handle the medical consequences of a major natural or artificial disaster.

The terrorism prevention program provided Virginia police departments with $8.7 mil*lion last year and $11 mil*lion in 2004 to buy gas masks, radios and other gear.

The budget provides $175 million in grants – the same as last year – to improve security at the nation’s 361 ports. The U.S. Coast Guard, however, estimates that as much as $6 billion is needed to bring ports nationwide into compliance with a 2002 federal law requiring stricter port safeguards, said Ed Merkle, security director for the Virginia Port Authority, which operates three cargo terminals in Hampton Roads.

“We realize that we still have a long ways to go,” Merkle said