The facts are clear. We must now get the ship our warfighters will require in a timeframe that matches the threat environment rather than the level of comfort of the bureaucracy. The statement of Navy Secretary John C. Phelan, when the service was abandoning the Constellation-class frigate program, is less a bumper sticker than a diagnosis: shipbuilding has become a pacing problem.
The pressure is reflected in the values and the fleet chart. Approximately 82 percent of the ships being constructed have been lagging behind the time schedule as the shipbuilding budget has nearly doubled in the last twenty years. What we have gotten is not a smaller Navy as such; it is a force in a vicious cycle whereby late deliveries push maintenance to the right, maintenance overruns consume labor and yard space, and new construction then inherits a spindly workforce and a poor infrastructure base.
The Constellation project was positioned as the less risky type of acquisition: an already floating parent design modified to American demands. Adaptation was reinvention. Another GAO observation that the redesign of the Navy left the program 70 percent done and three years behind schedule sheds light on the trend that has been observed to follow other high-profile surface combatants programs: The momentum of production has overtaken the maturity of design, then the weight, integration, and test gaps give way to delay. In the Constellation case, the weight increase went beyond tolerances on the same redesign pressure, and relief in the speed requirement was floated as a workaround and not a design goal.
All this does not take place in a vacuum in the face of the current fleet. Maintenance has become an identical chokepoint that reduces the availability to operations however ambitious the next shipbuilding plan may look on paper.
A review of the maintenance of destroyers and amphibious found by the Congressional Budget Office that the destroyers of DDG-51 type are expected to spend on average nine years of their lifetimes out of fleet undergoing maintenance- over two times as long as the original plans of the classes had expected. The operators are non-glamorous yet firm: late inspections and contract awards, parts delays, unexpected growth work, and modernization which is not well coordinated with the maintenance implementation. Practically, such frictions act like a levy on preparedness which increases both with old hulls and with the turnover of an industrial labor force.
The Littoral Combat Ship is the warning sign of what can go wrong when the machine attempts to purchase a great deal and identify the issues afterward. Reports by seamen and investigations of ships having been forced to sail despite engineering deaths, where the readiness theater is used in place of reliability. The cause of the failures was just as significant as the mechanical ones: small crews, underdeveloped mission systems, and sustainment plans that tended to leave operators at the mercy of contractor accessibility and proprietary information. When ships are built based on optimistic expectations of the crewing and modularity, the fleet compensates the optimism in downtime.
The Navy has made late attempts to put into service costly experiments instead of registering them as waste. The three Zumwalt-class destroyers, originally envisaged as a gunfire-support gunship in the stealth mode, are being redesigned with a long-range strike, with up to 12 Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles per hull. That turnaround can save operational currency, but it reinforces the precariousness of the exquisite procurement when there are no more than three hulls available to spread the cost of development, testing, training and maintenance overheads.
It is on that basis that the strategic comparison that continues to emerge is not tonnage or individual ship capability; but throughput. One suggestion is to go with a three-way, Japan-South Korea solution with joint development and mass production of smaller corvettes that will launch missiles and will have hulls more rapidly than U.S. shipyards can. The feasibility of that notion smashes headlong into the same fact that the Navy has been operating on, and that is that the industrial base is the weapon system, and it has already been involved–it is just not working at the rate at which the strategy requires it to work.
