Keeping the Fleet Afloat

Some details have emerged regarding the process the Navy will use to develop a plan to extend the life of ships. This is not a trivial problem, ships are designed with a specific lifespan and the Navy wants that life span increased. From the Honolulu Advertiser:

A four-member panel — two rear admirals, a retired vice admiral and a readiness and training official with the Navy's Fleet Forces Command — has been convened to examine a range of issues involving the Navy's surface fleet.

"It goes back to taking a look at how do you sustain the surface force for the expected service life?" said Capt Jeff Breslau, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Fleet. "So everything that touches that inspections, manning, training, equipping — all of the things that go into sustaining a ship" will be examined.

The Navy intends to expand the operational life of some of its ships five years or more beyond the typical lifespans to help achieve a 313-ship fleet. The Navy now has 285 deployable ships.

Some members of Congress have raised concerns that a series of ship failings represents possible systemic problems with the Navy's manning, training and maintenance.

"These concerns bring into question the Navy's ability to achieve even the expected service life of its fleet and sustain fleet readiness, let alone extend the service life of entire ship classes," U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Texas, said at a March subcommittee on readiness hearing.

The four-member panel's examination, which began in September and is expected to be completed early next year, will take into account troubling inspection results from 2008.

A few points here. When you build all your ships at once, like we did with the 600-ship fleet in the 80s, they will retire all at once. The single biggest factor that compounds this issue is that following the Reagan buildup, the first Bush administration never established a long term sustainment model for the Navy, then the Clinton and Bush administration gave us 16 straight years of very slow shipbuilding.

The lack of replacements for specific hull types means a lot of ships are going to come due for retirement at the same time. Now we want to extend the life of ships, and that won't be easy (may actually turn out to be a huge, expensive crap shoot).

There are few options. The best is to build out of the problem with a long term plan, something I am not sure there is money for, although I do think this administration does have the vision to see the value of. Honestly, I am not convinced the problem is politics here.

The Navy is going to face some interesting questions this year they haven't been asked before, specifically I think the Navy is going to get drilled on the questions relating to the balance of new ships and readiness. All of these dollars thrown into life extension are readiness dollars. How many billions will go towards just 5 more years?

The shipbuilding budget is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $13-15 billion annually, our of a total Navy budget of $108+ billion. The Navy spends more on aircraft than they do ships. The hard question is whether or not the Navy needs to be spending a higher percentage of the total Navy budget on ships, and if so, where else in the budget is money being spent that can be shifted towards shipbuilding?

The perfect example of the problem - the USS Enterprise (CVN 65). They are still pouring millions into the ship to get her fixed for just 1-2 more deployments. The total cost for getting the ships in shape for just 1-2 more deployments is already $617 million. Can we please be more responsible with taxpayer money than what has been demonstrated with the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) at a time our Navy is about to contract at a considerable pace?

I see a memo to the CBO developing here.