Facing readiness problems in surface combatants, the Navy is redoubling its efforts to improve fleet maintenance. The goal is to ensure that ships are fit for deployments and are able to reach and even surpass their expected service lives.
Ships need to stay in service longer than originally intended because it is becoming harder for the Navy to afford to build new ones. Soaring costs and tightening budgets are hindering the service’s attempts to expand its fleet to at least 313 ships by 2020. But with growing operational demands on the fleet, Navy officials and industry experts say keeping the current fleet in tiptop shape could prove to be a challenge unless it revamps the way ships are maintained through their entire life cycle.
The Navy has realized that if it wants to reach the 30- or 35-year service life of these ships, it needs to start gaining a better technical understanding of its hulls and onboard systems in order to plan out repairs in a more efficient manner, says Joe Carnevale, senior defense advisor at the Shipbuilders Council of America. This “life cycle engineering” effort will improve the maintenance of the existing 285 ships in its fleet, but only if Navy officials resource it properly.
“They’ve got to make the investment. They really don’t have a choice, or otherwise 15, 20 years down the road, they’re going to find that they can’t keep the ships going and the fleet size will drop even further,” says Carnevale.
Unlike the precisely planned maintenance process in the carrier and submarine forces, ship repair in the surface fleet has followed less stringent procedures that reflect a prolonged lack of attention to detail and engineering, experts say.
“Surface ship maintenance has kind of been the red-headed stepchild of the overall Navy maintenance,” says Rear Adm. James McManamon, deputy commander for surface warfare at Naval Sea Systems Command. “In the surface Navy, we have not done a real good job of collecting all of the maintenance requirements and also making sure it was engineered correctly.”
Officials have acknowledged the service’s perennial deficiency in managing the life cycle of the surface combatants. The Navy also has lacked an organization that could review requirements and ensure that those were being included in the ship repair schedules, McManamon says.
For ship repair, the Navy grants multi-ship, multi-option contracts that are executed in each homeport for each of the ships in a class. “That takes full advantage of private industry. But that also provides a bit of a challenge because you now have a multitude of different companies in different homeports. That makes it hard to centrally manage the status of surface ships in total,” says McManamon.
To fix the problem, the Navy in May established the surface ship life cycle management activity in Norfolk, Va., to track and organize availabilities — the time a ship spends at piers and dry docks for repairs. With approximately 45 full-time engineers and Navy civilians, the team will focus on standardizing maintenance plans and ship upgrades.
“The goal is to ensure that I always give the [Chief of Naval Operations] the ability to reach the expected service life of every surface ship,” says McManamon.
Industry has felt that better planning and identification of work for surface ship repair is long overdue, says Carnevale. “If you don’t know precisely what work needs to get done, what are the chances of getting the work done that you need done, successfully? The more effort you put into planning, the better your chances are of getting a successful availability.”
And more successful repairs mean that ships will be able to stay in service for longer periods because their parts will be better maintained.
Ship components such as the ventilation, the piping, the hull and the power plants can make or break service life, says Carnevale, a retired rear admiral and naval engineer.
On surface ships, the maintenance of those systems has often been delayed to later years because a couple rusty vent ducts and a few leaky pipes do not threaten the operability or safety of the vessel.
“It’s not necessarily been a deliberate malfeasance here on the surface ship maintenance. We’ve been able to take advantage of the redundancies on surface ships,” says McManamon.
If a ship breaks a shaft bearing, it can still steam home on its second one. If a watertight door doesn’t seal entirely, there are 40 others that will, experts note. But the redundancies have also been a hindrance because they give the Navy an excuse to defer the repairs. Such a practice has led to exorbitant charges and fees to fix problems that only worsened with time.
“We’ve had surface ships where we finally go into the tank, and we’ve delayed it for a dozen years, and now it’s suddenly a very expensive repair. And we find out in the middle of an availability … so now I’m paying premium costs,” explains McManamon.
The Navy struggles with the backlog of maintenance on surface ships because the process is not laid out against the technical longevity of the ship, says Carnevale. “Someone can’t go to a comptroller and say, ‘If you don’t do this maintenance that we have budgeted, then you can reduce service life for this ship by x-number of months, or y-number of years.’ The submarine guys can tell you that. ‘If you don’t do this maintenance, you have to retire this submarine x-number months early.’ You can’t say that with surface ships because the engineering hasn’t been done,” he says.
Submarines undergo stringent inspections and follow a strict repair timeline that is based on technical engineering.
“The dividends that are being reaped by the submarine service right now, in the very effective way that they’re maintaining their submarines, took decades of investment,” points out Carnevale. The surface force must follow suit. “It will take decades to ultimately get to where they want to be.”
It could cost the Navy millions of dollars, he says. Revamping the ship repair planning process will require engineers to spend thousands of hours to determine the technical life of every ship component. And they must break the components down by ship class, and sometimes even by individual hull.
Look toward the 2011 budget to see some real money being allocated to man this effort up, Carnevale adds.
McManamon says that the fleet readiness division in the office of the chief of naval operations, in particular, has ensured that the resources in future years will be there to support the surface ship life cycle management activity.
To justify the costs, officials point to the successes reaped by the submarine and aircraft carrier forces. Scores of engineering hours have determined exactly how long the pumps, hulls, catapults, nuclear power plants and other systems will last, and what maintenance ought to accompany them to ensure safety and also preserve service life.
“We’ve always been interested in technically understanding the boat so we get the full life of the ship,” says Rear Adm. Patrick Brady, deputy commander for undersea warfare at Naval Sea Systems Command. “We’re ensuring that there are safe operations. We minimize the maintenance burden and we’ve maximized the number of deployments out of those platforms.”
On the Los Angeles-class submarines, the original repair plan was for the submarines to spend 22 percent of their lives in shipyard availabilities to allow the Navy to attain 12 deployments from the hull. As the boats aged and progressed through availabilities, the force learned important lessons and made changes to the systems. Today, the Los Angeles-class submarines spend only 11 percent of their lives in availabilities.
“We do 15 deployments, and we’re still getting the full life of the platform by doing that,” Brady adds.
The maintenance plans for each submarine class fill five-inch binders that detail the thousands of jobs that must be completed per availability. Shipyard crews track all repairs and replacements in a computer database and keep detailed accounts of each hull as it goes through availabilities. These records help the submarine force plan availabilities and budget maintenance requirements with relative accuracy.
The new surface ship maintenance activity will take advantage of such tools and lessons and will model itself after the submarine and carrier communities, says McManamon.
“If there’s a good IT database program for monitoring tanks and voids per ship hull … then I’m taking that exact same program, putting in a surface ship module — so instead of USS Hartford, or USS Toledo, I’ll have USS Bunker Hill, or USS Arleigh Burke — and then I can use that same processing,” says McManamon, who oversees about 185 surface ships and approximately 18 ship classes for the Navy.
As the organization grows, it may co-locate with the carrier maintenance activity for synergy.
“What we’re doing is going to take a few years because we’re prioritizing the workload,” he says.
First the surface force needs to determine how many service years to expect from its ships. Each ship class has a notional service life — the number of years it is expected to sail in operations. But because each hull experiences different steaming situations and maintenance, determining how many years of service life the Navy can attain becomes complicated.
The Navy has initiated a pilot program to start measuring the age of its ships to determine how well it is doing on service life expectancy. The American Bureau of Shipping is conducting a survey on four hulls that represent four different ship classes: USS Germantown (LSD-42), USS Ross (DDG-71), USS Mobile Bay (CG-53), and USS Taylor (FFG-50). The surveys are focusing on items that impact the life cycle of the ship, such as hull thickness, foundations, electrical power and the AC power plant.
“We fully acknowledged that picking any single ship out of a 62-ship class doesn’t give you the automatic answer,” says McManamon. “The whole point of it was to give us a good technical foundation to let the CNO know whether we’re meeting that expected service life.”
McManamon intends to expand the pilot program to examine additional ships. But in the meantime, the team will fold data analysis of the four ships into class maintenance plans, which it hopes will help the team to better define requirements.
“As we do the life cycle management, we’ll probably see an increase in the requirements, meaning increased funding. But if we do this right, and we manage it correctly, I believe we can eventually get to a point where we’re going to save money,” says McManamon.
He cites data that shows how the costs for maintaining three ships’ tanks during a six-year period escalated because of unexpected work during availabilities. “If I would’ve done the tanks at the right time, it would’ve been x-dollars, but it’s almost three times as much four years later,” he says.
The activity will start gaining a majority of the requirements in each of the ship classes in the next two to four years, McManamon says. Costs in the short term will increase, but only temporarily.