No effort should be spared to build more vessels — or to make sure those we have can stay in the water.
No effort should be spared to build more vessels — or to make sure those we have can stay in the water.
M ostly when I write about the national defense, I report bad news, because the news has mostly been bad. But sometimes a ray of light pierces the cloud. That is the case now, because of an important new initiative to address one of the big deficiencies in the shipyard industrial base.
One area where America’s armed forces still have a decided advantage over China is the undersea domain. In particular the Navy’s attack submarines, and especially its newest Virginia class boats, are far superior to their counterparts in the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). The American subs can run silently in China’s near seas, collecting vital intelligence and, in the event of conflict, attacking ships with torpedoes and land targets with Tomahawk cruise or hypersonic boost-glide missiles — and they can attack without notice and almost with impunity. They are a vital deterrent to Chinese aggression and undoubtedly would be the biggest obstacle the PLA would have to overcome should Beijing decide to launch an invasion of Taiwan.
There are, however, two major problems with maintaining America’s advantage under the seas. The first is that the Navy doesn’t have enough submarines; we have fewer than 50 attack boats today, down from 100 at the end of the Cold War. The second is even more frustrating: The shipyard industrial base doesn’t have sufficient capacity to maintain the boats we already have — not at the same time that they are building new vessels.
The Government Accountability Office did a study three years ago on maintenance delays in the submarine fleet. The results ruffled a lot of feathers in the Pentagon and on Capital Hill. They showed that delays weren’t a bug but a feature of the existing system.
I can’t say it any better than GAO did:
The Navy has been unable to begin or complete the vast majority of its attack submarine maintenance periods on time resulting in significant maintenance delays and operating and support cost expenditures. GAO’s analysis of Navy maintenance data shows that between fiscal year 2008 and 2018, attack submarines have incurred 10,363 days of idle time and maintenance delays as a result of delays in getting into and out of the shipyards. For example, the Navy originally scheduled the USS Boise to enter a shipyard for an extended maintenance period in 2013 but, due to heavy shipyard workload, the Navy delayed the start of the maintenance period. In June 2016, the USS Boise could no longer conduct normal operations and the boat has remained idle, pierside for over two years since then waiting to enter a shipyard. GAO estimated that since fiscal year 2008 the Navy has spent more than $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2018 constant dollars to support attack submarines that provide no operational capability — those sitting idle while waiting to enter the shipyards, and those delayed in completing their maintenance at the shipyards.
The problem has actually gotten worse since this GAO report. The Boise, for example, is still waiting for maintenance; it’s not scheduled to go back into service until 2023, meaning that one-fifth of the ship’s expected 35-year life will have spent in a shipyard.
The good news is that help may be on the way. A proposal to build two new submarine-maintenance facilities in Ohio is starting to get national attention. The leader of the effort, Captain Edward Bartlett, founded a company two years ago for the specific purpose of solving the submarine-maintenance problem. He has assembled a coalition of other shipbuilders, unions, and local government officials with the purpose of building a ship-repair yard in Lorain, Ohio, and an accompanying equipment-overhaul depot in nearby Lordstown — northern Ohio communities with access to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The plan is to operate the facilities on a lease-purchase agreement with the Navy, float the submarines down the Seaway within specially built barges designed for that purpose, and hire a readily available local workforce to perform the necessary maintenance.
Bartlett and his allies seem like they know what they are doing. They unveiled the project in a convincing press event last week. They have assembled strong bipartisan support on the Hill, and their proposal is of course highly appealing to state and local officials in Ohio. Two new industrial facilities like these will be a tremendous economic boon to northern Ohio, providing secure and high-paying jobs to tens of thousands of residents.
Bartlett’s coalition is also smart enough — politics being what it is — to emphasize that their purpose is not to take business from shipyards but rather to expand the industrial base to do the work that cannot be done in the existing yards.
That may be of even greater importance to American security than getting the submarine fleet out of drydock and back into action. The competition with China will occur largely in the Indo-Pacific, which is most decidedly a maritime domain. The United States cannot hope to be successful without a greater naval presence in the region. For that, we simply have to have more ships, and that means we have to have more build-and-repair shipyards, and a bigger and better trained labor force to construct and maintain the vessels.
Many in Congress are prepared to spend considerable sums to expand the naval industrial base, and rightly so. The Bartlett proposal would build two new facilities in a way that should actually save the government’s money. It needs and deserves the attention of high-level officials in Congress and the Department of Defense — in part because, if it works, it could be a model for similar efforts in the decades ahead.
The ball is in the Navy’s court now. Obviously, the Pentagon and its civilian masters must fully satisfy themselves that Bartlett’s coalition can deliver on its plan. But the due diligence should be done with an urgency that is consistent with the vital national interests that are at stake.
We are witnessing in Ukraine what happens when great-power deterrence fails. If it fails in the far East, the consequences will be even worse; and whether deterrence holds there may turn, literally, on the number of ships that the Navy can keep deployed in theater. No effort should be spared to build more vessels — or to make sure those we have can stay in the water.