The commander of U.S. Naval Air Forces said Thursday that budget constraints are hurting the force’s ability to generate and recover readiness.
Vice Adm. Mike Shoemaker, who has served as the Navy’s "air boss" since January 2015, said that the service does not have enough funding to meet current commitments without exhausting aircraft and watercraft and harming long-term readiness.
"It’s really the ability to generate current readiness and recover readiness at the same time," Shoemaker told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. while discussing challenges facing the Naval Air Forces. "The supply of our forces is not sufficient to meet the demand right now."
Shoemaker said budget constraints and fiscal uncertainty have made it difficult to prioritize current and future commitments.
"It shows in both sustaining our aircraft and also our carriers, which are coming out of maintenance a little bit longer as we continue to operate them forward," he said.
Shoemaker echoed concerns of naval leaders and lawmakers who have warned of the service’s ability to overcome challenges and meet commitments on an increasingly tight budget.
Over the last four years, the Navy has been allocated $30 billion less than it requested, according to March testimony from Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations. President Obama’s fiscal year 2017 budget requested $155 billion in base funding to support the Navy and Marine Corps, $5 billion less than the funding level for the current fiscal year.
"The challenges are increasing and funding is decreasing," Richardson told lawmakers.
On Thursday, Shoemaker cited statements made at a joint congressional hearing in May by Rep. Randy Forbes (R., Va.), who chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces and has pressed Congress to increase maintenance funding for the Navy.
"Rep. Forbes had a statement at the beginning of that testimony, and he said, ‘We are not currently providing our Navy with the resources it needs to do what we ask, at least not without burning out our ships, planes, and sailors and undermining our long term readiness,’" Shoemaker told the audience. "I couldn’t have said it better than that, and I’ll leave that as sort of the encapsulation of our current readiness challenges."
"As I look forward, I think the future of naval aviation is bright, but we have to work through the fiscal uncertainties and those near-term readiness challenges," Shoemaker added.
Shoemaker said that the force does not have a sufficient number of flight-ready airplanes due to sequestration.
"We pay attention to the flight hour accounts because that directly translates into readiness," he said. "What we’ve seen since we’ve come through the heavy-use periods and recovering from sequestration, we’ve seen that we’re not able to fully execute those accounts. We don’t have sufficient up airplanes on the flight lines to fly."
Shoemaker also said that "enabler accounts" funding maintenance, parts acquisition, and contract logistics support have taken a huge hit from sequestration, compromising readiness.
"Those accounts have not been resourced close to the requirement. We dug a huge divot in every one of them when we came through sequestration," Shoemaker said. "We’re still trying to dig out of that readiness divot that we dug. We’re not there yet. Those enabler accounts are absolutely critical."
The Navy has lost funding as emerging powers like China and Russia have increasingly exercised maritime power to advance foreign policy goals.
China, for example, has made aggressive territorial claims in the South China Sea and bolstered naval forces in the region in defiance of warnings from U.S. military leaders. Russia, which opposes NATO’s buildup in Eastern Europe, recently conducted anti-terror naval exercises in the Mediterranean Sea.
Both nations plan to hold joint naval drills in the South China Sea in September.
"For the first time in decades, the United States is facing a return to great power competition. Russia and China demonstrate both the advanced capabilities and the desire to act as global powers," Richardson said in March.
"This past fall, the Russian Navy operated at a pace and in areas not seen since the mid-1990’s, and the Chinese [People’s Liberation Army Navy] continued to extend its reach around the world. Their national aspirations are backed by a growing arsenal of high-end warfighting capabilities, many of which are focused specifically on our vulnerabilities."
"Both nations continue to develop information-enabled weapons with increasing range, precision, and destructive capacity, and to sell those weapons to partners like Iran, Syria, and North Korea," Richardson continued.