Signaling an 11-carrier fleet the challenge now, Kaine says

When Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert and Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told the Senate Armed Services Committee today that they needed a signal about aircraft carriers, it wasn't a sailor snapping Morse message on a lamp that they had in mind, Sen. Tim Kaine knew.

When they came in to talk about the Navy and Marine Corps budget, they wanted a sense of how Congress is thinking about automatic budget cuts set to start kicking in around in fiscal year 2016 and beyond.

It matters because in the interim between now and then, the USS George Washington is going to come cruising into Newport News Shipbuilding, and the Navy needs to know if it will have the money for a major refueling, or only enough to mothball the carrier.

The Navy is emphatic that it needs 11 carriers. To stay there, it needs the George Washington to be refueled -- basically a complete overhaul that will extend her life for another quarter century.

But it needs to know it has the money.

And for that, Greenert and Mabus said, they need a signal.

Kaine says it won't be in dots and dashes, but language he's already working to stick into the next Defense authorization bill. That's the legislation that goes to Congressional appropriators, so they can actually dole out the money.

The language won't be exactly about actual sums for the work -- that's a matter for the budget for fiscal 2016, which Congress is unlikely to start tackling before the next spring.

Instead, Kaine will try to add words to the authorization bills that says it is Congress' intention to maintain an 11-carrier fleet by refueling the George Washington.

He says the sense he gets from fellow Armed Services Committee is that they like that idea.

And then, he read a signal of his own today.

The very first question from committee chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., about any of the thousands of line items in the Navy budget was about a carriers.

For Kaine, that reads: full speed ahead.

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