By Paul McLeary, Breaking Defense–

SURFACE NAVY ASSOCIATION: The Navy’s top admiral bluntly made the case today for his service to win a bigger budget than the other branches of the military, saying the usual practice of splitting the defense budget relatively evenly across the Army, Air Force and Navy won’t support President Trump’s security strategy.

“We need more money,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told a highly receptive audience here today. “If you believe that we require overmatch in the maritime, if you believe that we’re going to execute distributed maritime operations and operate forward in greater numbers now, that we need more iron, then we need more topline.”

Budgeting as usual, which means “a one-third, one-third, one-third cut, does not reflect the strategy,” Gilday said. “It isn’t necessarily aligned with where we need to go against the pacing threat that we face.” He said that he’s made these arguments inside the Pentagon before, but this is the first time the CNO has publicly made the case for his service to grow at a faster rate than the other services.

The Navy is staring down the barrel of perhaps the trickiest spending plan of any of the services, as it struggles to get ships out of repair availabilities on time, has a new class of aircraft carriers coming and must overhaul its Virginia-class submarines. On top of all that comes the biggest-ticket item — the new $128 billion Columbia-class nuclear-powered submarines about to begin construction. They will suck up over 30 percent of Gilday’s budget in a few years.

The first of the 12 Columbia subs is scheduled to begin construction in 2021 and enter service in 2031. Once completed they will carry a staggering 70 percent of the country’s nuclear arsenal within their hulls.

The Navy is also struggling to come up with a plan to reach 355 ships, something Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly has tasked his staff with producing as soon as possible. And he said he wants to reach that number in 10 years. Gilday seemed less sure — “355 in 10? Sure, if we get the dough.”

Gilday’s plea comes weeks after budget documents leaked out of the Pentagon showing that the Navy is prepared to slash up to two dozen ships from its future plans in order to consolidate gains elsewhere — namely, fixing its over-taxed fleet and starting new shipbuilding programs.

The fiscal 2021 budget will be released Feb. 10, and given the Navy’s proposal to slash ships, it’s clear the service is looking for ways to free up funds. Under the two-year budget deal Congress and the White House agreed to in July, the Pentagon’s ’21 budget will be $740 billion, a tiny notch up from the $738 billion it received in 2020. That doesn’t leave much wiggle room for the services to kick off new programs, a fact that the Navy is clearly struggling with.

During the Reagan buildup in the 1980s, the Navy’s percentage of the DoD budget was 38 percent, Gilday said. “Right now it’s 34 [percent]. So, I think historically I have a case to make.” He pointed out that just 1 percent more of the DoD budget would be about $7 billion he could pump into shipbuilding accounts/ That would take some pressure off the hard decisions he’s currently wrestling with. That 1 percent roughly aligns with the amount the Trump administration wants to pull from the Pentagon budget next year to pay for the president’s border wall with Mexico.

The admiral also said that in order to fix the ships he already has in the fleet, he’s looking at “perhaps a reduction in growth — not to say growth stops — but growth slows a bit.”

That is not a message the White House wants to hear, especially since President Trump campaigned in 2016 on the promise of building a 355-ship fleet, and regularly touts his claim that he has rebuilt the military.