Research Essay Peer Review

Nuclear Submarine Shipyard Availability’s

The mission of the United States Navy is “to maintain, train and equip combat-ready Naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas.1” One of the key components of accomplishing this mission is their steal ability through the use of nuclear powered submarines. The ability to keep these submarines at sea and operational is a key focus for all Naval organizations. Nuclear submarines require extended periods of extensive and complex maintenance at six to seven year intervals, performed at public and private Naval shipyards. Maintenance onboard a nuclear submarine has caused major delays and disruptions throughout the fleet, but there is no single answer to solve this very complex issue. 

When a nuclear submarine is unable to make its scheduled deployment, a different submarine must perform that job. This causes a cascading effect throughout the fleet because that new submarine is still required to make its own deployments as well as its scheduled major maintenance availability. Submarines have a wide array of capabilities that the Navy depends on such as intelligence gathering, special forces stealth delivery, and tomahawk missile attacks all in the name of national defense. National defense can never be compromised by a ship missing a deployment.

During a major maintenance availability, very complex repairs are made that are necessary for the submarines thirty plus lifespan. These repairs can only be performed by six shipyards, four public (Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, and Norfolk Naval Shipyard) and two private (General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries-Newport News Shipbuilding). A public shipyard is one that is owned and operated by the U.S. Navy. Their funding is dependent on the amount of work that is planned prior to the availability as well as any expanded scope work that often arises during such complex work. A private shipyard is one that is owned and operated by a private company. Their funding is solely determined on the pre-planned work submitted by the Navy.

These differences may seem insignificant, but the output level and adherence to schedule become enormous factors. A typical public shipyard availability will often go over their scheduled time due to the expanded work scope that frequently arises. At a private shipyard, only the work that is contracted is performed and any additional work is deferred to another time. Due to this work deferral, these availabilities often end exactly on schedule. These are the reasons that organizations like the Congressional Budget Office fail to capture when they release reports that show that private shipyards are less expensive than public shipyards2.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found recently3 that for an array of reasons, submarines availabilities over the past ten years are not starting on time and going much longer than anticipated. This has cost the tax payers $1.5 billion, for submarines to sit idle. This report touched on some of the reasons for the delays, one of them being the submarine force’s strict and unwavering emphasis on safety. To date, only two U.S. nuclear powered submarines have been lost, the USS Thresher (SSN 593) and the USS Scorpion (SSN 589). No submarine has been lost since very strict sub-safe requirements were put in place in 1963.

For an idea on the cost of repairs on board a submarine, in 2012 a shipyard work at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard set a fire on the USS Miami (SSN 755)4. This fire burned for 12 hours and caused estimated damages in excess of 450 million dollars. More importantly, the damage caused the submarine to be decommissioned nearly a decade early causing unbelievable national defense consequences for years to come.

These issues are extremely complex with many high level Naval personnel working on solutions for years. The Government Accountability Office reports recommended solution was for the “Chief of Naval Operations to conduct a business case analysis to inform maintenance workload allocation across public and private shipyards; this analysis should include an assessment of private shipyard capacity to perform attack submarine maintenance, and should incorporate a complete accounting of both (a) the costs and risks associated with attack submarines sitting idle, and (b) the qualitative benefits associated with having the potential to both mitigate risk in new submarine construction and provide additional availability to the combatant commanders.”3. This recommendation is still underway by the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. This report also recommended that the Navy look more into utilizing more private shipyards, a shift from their traditional plan of prioritizing public over private.

Other ways for the Navy to succeed are for them to place extra emphasis on the planning aspect of maintenance availability. The better planned out maintenance is, with all contingency plans that can be identified, the better the chance of a successful, on time delivery of the submarine. These advanced planning actions take skilled, experienced engineers with expertise in submarine operations and maintenance. These types of engineers with very unique and advanced technical skills are often sought after by the private yards because they are able to offer much higher starting salaries. In order to be more competitive, the federal government would need to offer higher starting salaries and bonuses to engineers with these specific skills. The public shipyards have recently begun a new major hiring phase with events happening at each yard. These are all good starts to a long term problem for national defense. No one single thing will fix such a complex problem, and it will take years to see any results.

References

1Navy Organization. U.S. Navy. “Mission of the Navy”. Archived from the original on 5 December 2008. Retrieved 15 April 2019.