The Navy’s Shipbuilding Doldrums Have Been Mostly Self-Inflicted

By Jerry Hendrix

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

 

Last week, in response to a mid-January order from the secretary of the Navy, the Navy’s assistant secretary for research development and acquisitions, Nickolas Guertin, and Naval Sea Systems commander Vice Admiral James Downey delivered a report on delays within the Navy’s shipbuilding program. The report revealed that the delays are more widespread and prolonged than had been previously understood. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro had requested the review after the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) revealed in January that the first of the Navy’s new FFG-62 Constellation-class frigates would hit the water one year late. Given that Del Toro, a retired Navy captain and former commander of an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, had invested himself personally in the new frigate program, describing it as one of his top priorities, he wisely requested that the acquisitions portion of the Navy’s large bureaucracy provide him with a full accounting of the status of all shipbuilding programs. The report was sobering, to say the least.

 

On its surface, the report revealed that five of ten major programs currently in production were facing delays stretching from twelve to 36 months. The carrier Enterprise is the third of the Navy’s new Ford-class carriers. Typically, the third ship in each class is expected to be the point where most programs have worked out any design kinks and begin to hit their production stride. However, the Enterprise is currently 18 to 26 months behind schedule. This delay has already triggered Navy leaders to examine whether they can squeeze one more deployment out of the USS Eisenhower (CVN-69), which was scheduled to decommission in 2027. This may sound simple, but such moves require careful calculations regarding the amount and accessibility of residual uranium remaining in Eisenhower’s two nuclear reactors, which were refueled in the 2001–04 time frame and are reaching the end of their serviceable lives.

 

These production delays postponing the retirement of aging hulls also inform the way the Navy’s leaders received the news that its Columbia class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) are presently twelve to 16 months behind schedule. The Columbia class represents the third generation of submarines built to carry nuclear-tipped missiles, which provided the nation with an assured second-strike capability. The original 41 SSBNs served from the early 1960s through the early 1980s. The Ohio class “boomers” began replacing these early boats in the 1970s and have been rotating on their nuclear-deterrent patrols ever since. Now it is the Columbia class’s turn to take up what is possibly the Navy’s most crucial mission: nuclear deterrence. The crisis with the Columbia-class schedule slippage is that delays in funding this program and initiating construction left little to no margin for error. The Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines that the Columbias are set to replace must leave the force on schedule. The fact is that the lives of the Ohio-class boats have already been extended beyond their originally planned 30-year service lives. The USS Henry M. Jackson (SSBN-730) is currently scheduled to serve 42 years, and the challenge goes beyond squeezing a few more neutrons out of the boat’s reactor core. The most pressing danger lies in the structural integrity of the submarines’ hulls, which have a finite number of dives built into their designs before endangering their crews.

 

Two more program delays, these affecting variants of the Navy’s Virginia-class fast-attack submarines (SSNs), represent three years for the boat’s Block IV and two years for its Block V designs. The Block IV subs were designed with certain modifications to lower the overall life-cycle costs of the class, whereas Block V subs incorporate a longer hull to allow the boats to carry more Tomahawk cruise missiles — mitigating planned decreases in the fleet’s submerged-cruise-missile inventory that will accompany the decommissioning of the Navy’s four Ohio-class conventional guided-cruise-missile boats beginning in 2026. Delays in Block V represent an extension of the risk period when the nation lacks a sufficient submerged conventional penetrating-strike capacity in its naval force to well over a decade. It is troubling that this shortfall comes just as tensions in the western Pacific are peaking in the middle of the “Davidson Window,” a period of time highlighted in 2021 by the retiring commander of the Indo-Pacific command when he felt China would most likely take action against Taiwan.

 

The potential for a three-year delay for the FFG-62 Constellation-class frigate was especially bracing given that the news just 45 days earlier had indicated a delay of just one year. Further reporting revealed that the responsibility lay not just with the shipbuilder but also with the Navy. The Constellation class emerged from a design-selection process that was predicated on the idea that the adaptation of a proven “mature design” already in service in foreign navies would reduce both risk and the chance for delays. However, in response to questions from defense reporters, Navy leaders revealed that whereas the original agreed-upon design for the Constellation-class frigates shared 85 percent commonality with their European FREMM cousins, design alterations imposed by NAVSEA engineers and civilian staffers have reduced the first ship’s shared DNA to less than 20 percent and added 36 months in construction time even as decisions to decommission ill-fated littoral combat ships (LCS) are driving down battle-force numbers from their current levels in the low 290s to the 280s.

 

There’s some good news, or at least no-news pieces, within the report. Five major programs, including the Navy’s two major amphibious platforms and its venerable Burke-class destroyers, remain largely on schedule. There are also identifiable and understandable issues within the nation’s shipbuilding yards, challenges with recruiting and retaining workforce, as well as problems with downstream supplies. However, the number of programs experiencing delays across multiple shipbuilders and the depth of those delays reveals a commonality of cause: the Navy broadly and its acquisition arm particularly. One must feel some sympathy for Assistant Secretary Guertin. He just assumed his position in December 2023 after being nominated in September 2022, nearly eighteen months after the Biden administration took office. This has meant that Secretary Del Toro has been forced to play a pickup game with his acquisitions program, making do with temporary administrators and senior executives. Vice Admiral Downey, who was promoted to his present rank and position from within NAVSEA, deserves far more scrutiny.

 

NAVSEA, which employs a staff of some 83,000 civilian and military personnel, exhibits the classic symptoms of a vast and increasingly calcified bureaucracy. It continuously seeks to take innovative and new ideas and make them fit into traditional concepts, molds, or established programs by leveraging an ever-growing list of rules, regulations, and red tape. New designs that incorporate emergent technical capabilities like the Ford and Columbia classes, fast-evolving programs like the Virginia-class boats that seek to adapt on the run to a changing security environment, and even mature foreign designs like the Constellation-class frigate all suffer under the regulatory burden of the overlarge bureaucracy that is NAVSEA. It’s also an institution that is notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to criticism from external sources.

 

This week marks the U.S. Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space conference at National Harbor, just south of Washington, D.C. The event attracts active-duty military members, civilian political appointees, senators, members of the House, well over 1,000 industry exhibitors, and virtually every member of the defense-focused press. Effectively, it’s Navy-Marine Corps-Coast Guard Palooza. Normally representatives from the Navy’s various systems commands provide a series of program briefs throughout the day. The schedule for these briefs was announced early on Friday, April 5, but then on Saturday, representatives of the Navy, most likely from NAVSEA, announced that there would be no one-on-one follow-up interview opportunities between Navy briefers and members of the press, normally a staple of the event, and clearly indicating a lack of confidence in the various program managers’ abilities to defend their programs and related decision-making.

 

This critique should not be taken as a total exoneration of the shipbuilding industry. Workforce recruitment and retention across all major shipbuilders remains a challenge that is principally on them. The Navy, through various investment programs, has attempted to help industry with this challenge, but the problem is still up to the industries to solve. There have also been problems with poor quality control over crucial components that have caused increased costs, rework orders, and delays, as well as over-reliance on single-point-failure downstream suppliers that must be worked out. There have also been instances where a defense prime becomes distracted and spreads its strategic focus to other markets. There is plenty of blame to go around, but these delays span five major programs across four major shipbuilders, suggesting that the problem is truly systemic, and the heart of that system is the Navy itself.

 

Del Toro is to be commended for demanding the 45-day review of the Navy’s shipbuilding programs. In doing so he demonstrated the instincts of an old Navy salt who feels the odd vibration in his engineering spaces transmitted through a ship’s steel hull to the soles of his black-shoed feet and seeks to understand the source of the problem quickly. Hopefully he will now require Admiral Downey and Secretary Guertin to generate a plan to return Navy shipbuilding to a safe and executable course. It will take strong civilian leadership to effect such change, but Del Toro has demonstrated the strength to demand a true accounting rather than to continue to ignore the problem. Del Toro must plot a new course for Navy shipbuilding and then put the service’s rudder hard over.