CDR Salamander - When Your Navy is too Small, the Bill Comes Due Bigly

As the record shows on CDR Salamander and the Midrats Podcast, our shortage of maintenance facilities and the resulting lack of capacity have been known problems for decades. We have known that we don’t have enough capacity to meet even expected peacetime requirements, much less any flex in the system for wars at sea, large or small.

As such, absolutely no one should be surprised at this or think it is a new problem. If you see anyone pretending it is either, immediately understand that person is not worth listening to.

Here we are, as expected, via Diana Stancy at Breaking Defense.

The US Navy expects it will take years for its fleet to recover from recent drawn out deployments, with leaders bracing for a surge in maintenance work that could strain shipyard capacity and force trade-offs between repairs and modernization.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said Monday that the service is bracing for maintenance availabilities — particularly impacting the destroyer fleet — to snowball as some of its aircraft carriers and surface vessels return from more than 300-day long periods at sea. As a result, the Navy is weighing how to prioritize repairs, shorten some timelines and defer larger projects without pushing the service’s schedule further behind.

…

“The industrial base will not be able to swallow that pill, and so we’ll have to sequence that,” Kilby said during an Oct. 8 National Commission on the Future of the Navy hearing. “There’s a couple things that can happen there. I’ll defer maintenance. I’ll either squish the package into the bare minimum and not do modernization things I need to do. So that’s the bill that’s being paid there.”

This year, extended deployments have pushed the Navy’s ships well beyond their typical seven-month period at sea. For example, the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford completed a 326-day deployment in May — shattering the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln’s previous record of 294 days at sea in 2019 and 2020.

No, it is six months, not seven.

Eric Labs, a senior analyst for naval forces and weapons at the Congressional Budget Office, said the full impact of ongoing military operations on the fleet is difficult to predict because it’s unclear how long they will continue. However, he said the Navy has historically taken “at least several years” to catch up on maintenance after previous military operations that required a surge in naval capacity.

“At a general level, ships that are missing their maintenance availabilities now because of ongoing operations would have that maintenance manifest itself over the next several years,” Labs told Breaking Defense.

Eric is great.

While Labs said that some private maintenance shipyards that work on the Navy’s surface fleet have voiced concerns about a lack of work at present, he said they would face a hefty workload once destroyers return that would create planning and workforce challenges for both industry and the service.

“The private maintenance yards in the US are undergoing a famine and then, later, will experience a feast cycle,” Labs said. “The consequence of that will depend on unique ship circumstances. It could mean some ships will need to return to sea before getting all the maintenance they need, which could just exacerbate problems in the future. Or it could mean some ships will sit idle until the maintenance can be done.”

Of course, the question is—when will we stop appreciating this problem, and start taking action? We will find ourselves here again.

Bradley Martin, a retired Navy captain who is now a senior policy researcher at RAND, also predicted it would take years for the fleet to recover from maintenance backlogs stemming from current operations in the Middle East. He said nearly every ship class would likely be affected, although the most acute maintenance issues could hit the destroyer fleet, given its heavy operational use in the Middle East.

We are seeing good movement on new construction efforts, but what about maintenance? Modernizing existing shipyards and bringing online a new public shipyard will be a great help, but this will take years to fix, and bipartisan support to ensure it does not get strangled in the cradle.

Patience and persistence are needed. Lack of both is part of what got us here, but more, faster if possible.

Of note, both Labs and Martin quoted in the article above have been on the Midrats Podcast in the last year. If you have not listened to their episodes, here you go!

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