The savings in this option are somewhat uncertain because the final costs of some types of ships the Navy plans to buy over the next 10 years are uncertain. The number of ballistic missile submarines also would not be affected by the cuts, because Navy officials consider those ships their highest acquisition priority. The number of aircraft carriers, would remain unchanged, however, to comply with a statutory requirement that the Navy maintain a force of at least 11 such ships. The cuts would affect several types of ships in the Navy's fleet: surface combatants, attack submarines, amphibious ships, and combat logistics and support ships. Specifically, this option would reduce the number of ships that the Navy plans to purchase over the next 30 years from 301 to 177, decreasing the number to be purchased over the 2019-2028 period from 110 to 71. For the extension of DoD's FYDP, CBO's method relies on historical experience, with adjustments for four factors: rate (the production efficiencies that are made possible when several ships of the same type are built simultaneously or in close succession at a given shipyard), learning (the gains in efficiency that accrue over the duration of a ship's production as shipyard workers gain familiarity with a particular ship model), acquisition strategy (such as whether ship contracts are granted directly to a company or awarded as the result of a competitive process), and economic factors. Because CBO's estimates are in nominal dollars, the future savings in nominal dollars are calculated against the historical average, which then grows at the rate of the shipbuilding index. To determine the historical average for shipbuilding, CBO adjusted the amount of appropriated dollars over the past 30 years using an index for naval shipbuilding provided by the Navy. The savings were determined by calculating the difference between historical average funding and amounts in DoD's 2019 Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) and CBO's extension of that plan. Because most ships are built over many years, outlay savings are not fully captured within the 10-year period.) (For naval ship construction, outlay savings are usually substantially less than budget authority savings.
Outlays would fall by a total of about $50 billion over that period, CBO estimates. If funding for ship construction was reduced to its 30-year average, discretionary budget authority would decline by about $75 billion through 2028 compared with amounts under the Department of Defense's (DoD's) plans. This option would decrease budget authority for naval ship construction to the 30-year average in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. That amount is 80 percent more than the average of $16 billion per year (in 2018 dollars) that the Navy has spent on shipbuilding over the past 30 years. Including the costs of all activities funded by the Navy's shipbuilding account, such as refueling nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and outfitting new ships, the average annual cost of implementing the plan is about $29 billion. Homer is describing ships of his own time, not those of the Bronze Age.The Navy's fiscal year 2019 shipbuilding plan proposes buying 301 new ships over the next 30 years at an average cost of about $27 billion per year (in 2018 dollars), the Congressional Budget Office estimates. The ships and construction techniques described in the Iliad and the Odyssey are thus anachronisms. Eventually, the method of building ships with pegged mortise-and-tenon joinery was rediscovered or reintroduced. Because of this social collapse and the subsequent depopulation of the Greek mainland, the Iron Age Greeks returned to the much simpler method of laced construction. A review of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and archaeological evidence suggests that the Mycenaeans used pegged mortise-and-tenon joinery in shipbuilding until the dissolution of the social structure of the Late Bronze Age.
Recent research into ships built with laced construction supports an alternative interpretation that Odysseus joined the planks with dowels and then secured the planking with pegs and lacings. Since its reinterpretation by Lionel Casson in 1964, the boat-building passage at Odyssey 5.234-53 has been widely accepted as a reflection of a construction technique by which mortise-and-tenon joints, secured by wooden pegs, were used to fasten plank edges together.