Building ships quickly means using extensive 3-D modeling, prototyping and risk reduction analysis instead of assuming a modified existing design with new weapons translates into speedier delivery, the Navy’s former acquisition executive said Wednesday.
That was the main lesson the Navy learned in launching the Constellation-class frigate program at Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, Nickolas Guertin told a Hudson Institute audience.
To “arrest the decay in the design,” Guertin said the Navy sent engineers and naval architects to Wisconsin to work side-by-side with Fincantieri’s teams to put the program back on track.
The guided-missile frigate program is running three years behind schedule with the first ship expected to deliver in 2029. USNI News reported that the frigate’s design should be mature enough for the shipbuilder to enter continuous production by May and the Navy could then work toward tapping a second yard.
“Sometimes, you’re just better off designing a new ship,” said Guertin, the Navy’s former assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition. He added: It “turns out modifying someone else’s design is a lot harder than it seems.” The design is based on the FREMM multi-mission frigate design in use with the Italian and French navies.
“There wasn’t a lot of ability to do government-business fusion to take advantage of the different markets,” as China and allies like South Korea, Japan and Finland do, Guertin said.
The Navy’s practice of modifying a design and providing the weapons system isn’t leading industry to deliver “a smaller, more affordable surface combatant,” he argued.
He added: “we are not buying a commercial product” off the shelf, but a warship with requirements to “fit our national and military needs. … this is a unique military product.”
Later, Guertin said, “there aren’t any easy, fast buttons in shipbuilding.”
Pointing to last year’s 45-day review of the Navy’s shipbuilding programs, he said the assessment discovered “some eye-watering leaks” in timetables for shipbuilding.
Even programs like the Navy’s top priority, the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program, are running between one year and 16 months behind schedule. Guertin said the Navy did a better job on the early work with new boomers compared to the frigates. He cited the propulsion systems, missile tubes and using combat systems from the Virginia-class boats.
“We de-risked that ship” by taking those steps, he added. But the delays continued.
“In a one-page summary of the review [ordered by Del Toro], the service cited lead ship problems like design maturation, supply chain issues, and difficulty finding skilled workers as factors in the program delays,” USNI News reported last April.
“First in class never go in time,” Guertin said. “We don’t resource to actually what it will cost. Have it worked out before you nail down the budget” for that ship.
To bring down the time surface ships are spending in repair, he said the Navy should establish a “ship’s life-cycle sustainment” system by putting responsibility for that back with program executive officers and managers.
To achieve less time in the yard and more time in the fleet, a priority in Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s navigation plan, Guertin said the Navy could perform shorter maintenance availabilities more frequently.
“We don’t think long term in letting contracts” from construction to maintenance, Guertin said.
Using aviation’s 80 percent readiness target, Franchetti wrote: “We can dramatically increase the combat surge readiness of our platforms if we sustainably eliminate delays from the maintenance overruns that cannibalize force availability. We will only accomplish this by getting platforms in and out of maintenance on time; in addition, we must embrace novel approaches to training, manning, modernization, and sustainment to ready the force. By 2027, we will achieve and sustain an 80 percent combat surge ready posture.”
The 2027 date refers to a date often mentioned as the year in which the China’s military would have the capability to invade the self-governing island of Taiwan.
Acknowledging that the maintenance, repair and overhaul in the cruise industry is different than more complex work on warships, Guertin said they “have an enviable level of precision” as to when ships enter the yard and leave.
The existing Navy practice is “not a good model” for timely maintenance, he said.
Like the shipbuilding industry, the repair business happens mostly in small yards and has fallen into steep decline with the shrinking American-flagged fleet and changed orders for Navy business as it retires ships early.
The most Hudson Institute report noted that “when the Navy decides to retire a ship early, it cancels the remaining MRO periods planned for the ship. Such moves have eliminated thousands of person-days in planned work during the last several years as the Navy moved dozens of LCS, minesweepers, and amphibious ships onto the decommissioning list. Each schedule change creates uncompensated costs for replanning work, hiring or laying off workers, and modifications to subcontracts for support services. Perhaps most importantly, tradespeople are leaving the unreliable repair industry.”
Hudson offered steps to speed up the process in the yard, like controlling the work flow and restoring predictability to the yards’ workforce using artificial intelligence to harness data as the public yards do, awarding contracts earlier so they can stabilize the workforce and enforcing work order discipline to cut off additions to the work order package once the ship is in the yard.
Guertin argued the Navy benefitted from Del Toro’s trip to shipyards in Japan and South Korea, where he saw how they design, build and repair ships and urged the Navy to adopt their best practices and encouraged them to invest in the United States.
In the February issue of Proceedings, retired Navy Capt. Brent Sadler wrote: “a strong navy is necessary to securing trade, but building that navy is impossible without a commercial fleet conducting prosperity-generating commerce. …[Now] less than 0.4 percent of U.S. commerce conveyed on U.S. ships … to sustain combat operations and a wartime economy. After decades of neglect, the remedy to the nation’s predicament is to strengthen the maritime industrial base in concert with treaty allies.”
“We do have to have a national perspective” on the value of shipbuilding and repair, Guertin said at the Hudson event. “You have to be a competitive player,” he added, referring to taxpayer investment and attracting overseas investors who see there’s “good business to be had” in U.S. yards.
