Other Levers To Pull
For the time being, overtime is the biggest lever for Moore to adjust, but he said it can really only fine-tune how many man-days of work get accomplished and cannot compensate for major workforce shortages. The four shipyards rely on overtime for about 12 percent of their work, Moore said, which could be increased a bit more – though the Navy’s focus now is making each employee more productive in the hours he or she puts in.
The Navy has hired executive coaches to work with naval shipyard leadership to help them become better supervisors at the deckplate, Moore said. And initiatives are being put in place to help new hires start contributing to the workload even before they’re qualified to work on the ship.
“We actually can take somebody that just came into the yard and we can train them on some basic stuff – so for instance, we could train an electrician how to tear down and rebuild a circuit breaker; now, they may not be able to go on the ship to work, but if we’re pulling circuit breakers off to be overhauled, we can, earlier than we would have in the past, take our worker and let them do something that’s productive,” he said.
“For instance, we can take a pipefitter, and while they’re not ready to go on the ship and fit pipe and weld it up, they can take pipe in the shop and we can teach them how to bend it properly. So we’re getting more utility out of the workers faster than we were getting it previously, and that’s one of the other things we’re going to need to do.”
NAVSEA headquarters is also working with the four yards to share best practices and reduce the variance in how work gets done across the four locations.
All told, Moore said, “an availability that today might take 250,000 man-days to execute, maybe we do the exact same work for 225,000 because the workers are more productive.”
That increased productivity will be important because the next few years look pretty similar to 2017’s higher-than-average workloads.
Fortunately, sending some work to the private yards should remain an option for the next couple years, until the Navy can start working off its backlog. Moore said that, for now, “we’re watching pretty carefully to see if there’s any other submarine work out there that we may have to consider making available to private sector as a way to balance the workload out. The private sector has made clear to us they’re ready if we’d like to provide them more work.”
USS
Montpelier (SSN-765) is at Electric Boat, and Newport News is taking USS
Columbus (SSN-762) and USS
Helena (SSN-725), with
.
With an upcoming boom in new-construction submarine work, though – and the 20-percent-higher price tag for work at private yards – this isn’t a viable long-term solution to addressing maintenance backlogs at the public yards, but it may be good enough to keep work moving along until the public yards have the capacity to sustain themselves.
Moore said NAVSEA and the shipyards will have to make future decisions about sending an attack sub to the private yard much earlier than they have recently. With
Boise, which was supposed to go to Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Fiscal Year 2016 and will now wait until FY 2019 for work, Moore admitted “we just waited so long that we kind of ran out of trade space” to do anything other than defer the maintenance availability indefinitely. Talks about how to handle lack of capacity – by either putting a submarine into the private yard or sliding an availability to the right – should be taking place 12 to 18 months ahead of the planning start of maintenance, Moore said, adding that NAVSEA was working hard now to try to avoid another
Boise situation.
The Effect on Aircraft Carriers
The last three aircraft carriers have delivered on time from their planned incremental availabilities, and a fourth, USS
John C. Stennis (CVN-74) is also tracking on time. But Moore said NAVSEA and the public yards couldn’t declare victory yet on the carrier side.
“Now, they have been the six-month variety, not the docking ones. So [USS
Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69)] will come in for a docker here in the fall, and then we’ve got on the West Coast USS
Nimitz (CVN-68) when she comes back, she’ll be going back in the dock. So I’m pleased with the progress we’re making, the track record on the carrier side of the house has been good this year. In fact, the number of lost operational days on the carrier side is almost zero, and that’s what we want it to be,” he said.
“I think the CVNs are in the box. Again, we’ve got some docking availabilities coming up and those are significantly harder, so we have to prove that we can do the docking availabilities just as well as we do the shorter planned incremental availabilities.”
The Effect on Submarines
The submarine side is where it will become apparent if Moore’s plans – his focus on advanced planning, the growth in the workforce, worker-efficiency initiatives and more – are actually successful.
The admiral said the ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) are the Navy’s top priority and almost always deliver back to the fleet on time. The only recent exception is USS
Nebraska (SSBN-739), which just finished up sea trials but had been slightly delayed by indigenous razor clams getting into the seawater-side condenser tubes, which had to be cleaned out.
Of the 21 ships in maintenance at naval shipyards now, 11 are on track for on-time delivery – and of the 10 that are not, one is
Nebraska, and the other nine are attack submarines.
Four of those nine attack subs have faced continual delays over the past years and are the “problem children” Moore refers to. Those will all wrap up by the end of the year. Five SSNs will be part of the backlog pushed into 2018.
“The SSNs have really been the Achilles’ heel, and that starts with capacity,” Moore said.
“The SSNs is really where I would expect, as we head into Fiscal Year 2018 and ‘19 and ‘20, they are going to be the ones that gain the most benefit of adding capacity at the shipyards.”
