Vice Adm. Michael Gilday promised the Senate Armed Services Committee that, if he were confirmed to serve as the next chief of naval operations, he would be transparent about ongoing challenges with the first-in-class USS
Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) and ensure that other new programs like the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine avoid the same pitfalls.
During Gilday’s confirmation hearing, SASC Chairman Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) was critical the Ford-class program, telling Gilday that the carrier fleet has been forced to operate with one-too-few ships since USS
Enterprise’s (CVN-65) decommissioning in 2012 due to
Ford’s failures.
“The
Ford was awarded to a sole-source contractor” and asked to incorporate immature technologies with “next to no testing and (that) had never been integrated on a ship: a new radar, arresting gear, and the weapons elevators,” Inhofe said.
“The Navy entered into this contract in 2008, which, combined with other contracts, ballooned the cost of the ship to more than $13 billion without understanding the technical risk, the cost or the schedules. This ought to be criminal.”
Inhofe said
Ford is a “great ship” that is needed in the fleet, but he said a visit to the Newport News Shipbuilding yard left him feeling that “there was a level of arrogance that, it didn’t really make any difference that the elevators don’t work,” noting that only two of the 11 weapons elevators are currently installed and working.
Despite a promise from Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer in January that the elevators would be complete by the end of the ship’s post-shakedown availability at Newport News – which was set to end this month but has been pushed back to October –
, there has been insufficient progress on the elevators, Inhofe charged.
“At that time,
Ford was supposed to pull out from its maintenance period this month. The departure has since been delayed until October. Even with this delay, only two of the 11 elevators are going to be ready in October. Nine elevators will not be ready and likely will not be complete until 2020 or later. The secretary’s promise to the president eight months ago indicates either poor knowledge of the facts or poor judgment. This is the latest example of Navy leaders not being straightforward when it comes to their programs. That’s quite a charge, isn’t it?”
Inhofe asked Gilday to weigh in, since “this is going to be dumped in your lap.”
Gilday said “I share your concern” and said that, while as many as four elevators may be done by the end of
Ford’s PSA, “it’s still unacceptable. We need all 11 elevators working in order to give us the kind of redundancy and combat readiness that the American taxpayer has invested in this ship.”
“We’ve had 23 new technologies introduced on that ship, as you know. Of those, four were immature when we commissioned
Ford in 2017. We have seen progress in the launching system, the arresting gear and also with the dual-band radar. The reliability of those systems is trending in the right direction and actually where we want to be based on the last at-sea testing,” Gilday said.
“It’s the elevators, I think, that is the remaining hurdle to get over to get that ship at sea.”
Gilday vowed to be transparent with SASC on the program’s progress and that the Navy would take lessons learned from the Ford-class program and ensure that other first-in-class ships, including the ongoing Columbia-class SSBN, would not make the same mistakes in managing risk. For example, he said, the Navy did not do shore-based prototyping and testing on the elevators because they were deemed a low-risk new technology, whereas much more risk-reduction work was done on the radars, the arresting gear and the launching system due to them being considered higher risk.
