The Navy has been treating the private shipyards like their “corner garage,” the service’s recently departed acquisitions boss said Wednesday, instead of making investments that will keep maintenance periods predictable and as short as possible.
Historically, the service plots out each availability one at a time, sometimes pulling a ship into the yard without a clear idea of what work must be done and without always having enough parts and skilled technicians on hand to complete it on time.
“We don’t plan out availabilities for multiple years at a time. We pat ourselves in the back if we put out a contract 120 days in advance,” Nikolas Guertin, now a senior research fellow at the Virginia Tech National Security Institute, said during a Hudson Institute event. “If you were a private ship-repair company, it’s very hard to attract private capital to invest in your shipyard capability, because you’re not really sure what work you’re going to have two, three years down the road.”
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, then, where ships don’t plan well for maintenance periods, shipyards aren’t prepared for the work they’re about to undertake, the ships overrun their availabilities by months and months and the next ships in line have to push off their maintenance while they wait for a spot in the yards.
The Navy is working toward a fix for this readiness-eating loop, with a push for more maintenance periods on a shorter cycle, so that a list of specific, pressing work can be done on time, and wish list items can be pushed to the next availability. The goal is to get 80 percent of surface combatants deployable at any given time.
Improving maintenance systems was a focus of the previous chief of naval operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, and remains so to current CNO Adm. Lisa Franchetti. In January, the Navy released a new enterprise strategy that aims to get ships into maintenance every six years, rather than the current 10 to 12, with quicker turnaround times.
To make that happen, said Brian Holland, president of MHI Ship Repair and Services, commands need to have a clear maintenance plan and a complete picture of the material condition of ships.
Many times, he said at the Hudson event, contracts are awarded with 25 percent of the maintenance items categorized as must-do, with the remaining optional items becoming required as soon as the availability begins, giving the shipyard no time to get parts and labor in place before the ship is on site.
“If the work identified in the work specification items is inaccurate to what needs to be done on the deck plates, I may not know that until I’m actually physically on the deck plates,” he said.
That’s especially true with parts and labor, said Paul Clifford, general manager of General Dynamics NASSCO.
It’s tough to hire enough technicians for an availability with that 120 days, or sometimes less, of advance notice after winning a contract. Same goes for materials, he added, suggesting the Navy invest in spare parts ahead of a maintenance period, so they’re ready to go as they’re needed.
Clifford used the example of the service’s F/A-18 availability overhaul, another 80-percent readiness target set in 2018.
“First thing they did is they bought a bunch of spare parts to make those planes readily available,” he said.
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