The Navy Needs More Public Shipyards

O n January 27, a Friday, when most government agencies release bad news in the hope that everyone forgets about it by Monday, the Navy announced that four of its West Coast dry docks have been taken out of service owing to potential risks from earthquake damage. One of these dry docks is the only one on the West Coast that can service the Navy’s Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, which means that any carrier damaged on the West Coast now must go through the Strait of Magellan off the tip of South America to get to Norfolk and a dry dock. However, it is the other three dry docks that are most troubling, as they are the ones the Navy depends on to do depot-level maintenance on its nuclear fast-attack submarines. The strategic implication of this decision reveals that the nation’s national-security warning lights have gone from flashing yellow to a steady, bright red.

Every battle plan regarding the defense of Taiwan against a Chinese communist invasion or of Europe against further Russian territorial aggrandizement depends on the superiority of American nuclear fast-attack submarines. These “boats,” as they are popularly known within the U.S. Navy, are the silent hunter-killers of the fleet. Their nuclear reactors give them the ability to surge out quickly across the oceans to trouble spots and to lay silently in contested waters to sink enemy ships. Just as submarines were crucial to America’s victory in World War II, they are central to our plans for the next war, wherever it occurs. But our submarine force is in trouble, in terms both of the production of new boats and of the maintenance of the ones we already have.

At the Submarine League’s annual symposium last November, the program executive officer for the fast-attack force said that 18 of his submarines were either in maintenance or waiting to go into maintenance. That’s 36 percent of the effective undersea combat power of the U.S. Navy forced to the sidelines. Part of the problem with this is that after the Cold War the Navy reduced the number of shipyards it controls from eight to four. The four remaining are in Norfolk, Va.; Portsmouth, N.H.; Bremerton, Wash.; and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and these yards were given the charter of performing depot-level (the deepest, most extensive repair level) maintenance on the Navy’s nuclear-powered carriers and submarines.

These public Navy yards do little other than this mission. The maintenance of the Navy’s surface force is farmed out to private yards — they are also years behind schedule — even as the Navy nine days ago made the decision to largely suspend depot-level maintenance in Bremerton. The Navy has contracted two private submarine yards to do maintenance on its submarines. The USS Hartford is at the Electric Boat yard in Groton, Conn., and appears to be both on time and on schedule with its overhaul. However, the USS Boise and USS Columbus are at the Huntington Ingalls yard at Newport News, Va., and are years behind schedule. They make up many of the 1,100 maintenance days behind schedule in the Navy’s submarine-maintenance plan, although it has stated that it thinks it can get that number down to 700 days by 2026. The problem is that 2026 is too late, given China’s threats against Taiwan. Even then, 700 days, or two full dry-dock years, just isn’t good enough.

What basic math suggests is that the Navy cut too much infrastructure during the post–Cold War “peace dividend” years. The slashing of four Navy yards, including two that were capable of servicing nuclear-powered ships and submarines, through the Base Realignment Commission process removed both fat and meat, and even injured the Navy’s infrastructural bones. This should serve as a lesson to those budget hawks who believe that there are enough “efficiencies” in the Defense Department budget today to bring about significant reductions in defense spending.

PHOTOS: U.S. Navy Attack Submarines

Regardless, with the Navy 700 days in arrears on submarine-maintenance performance, which is the best-case projected schedule, the evidence suggests the need for two more dry docks. We could turn to the two privately owned yards that can work on nuclear submarines, but they are already having difficulties meeting the demand to build two or more new Virginia-class fast-attack boats per year while also assembling the new Columbia-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile nuclear-deterrent submarines, or “Boomers,” as the Navy colloquially refers to them. This problem is not abnormal. During the 1960s, too, when the Navy was intent on building its first ballistic-missile submarines, the “41 for Freedom” boats, the production of fast-attack submarines fell behind. However, this type of falloff in fast-attack production didn’t occur the next time we refreshed the Boomer fleet. During the era that stretched from the mid 1970s to the end of the Cold War, when the two submarine-construction yards built 18 Ohio-class Boomers while building 62 Los Angeles–class fast-attack boats, at a pace of two fast-attack boats per year and a Boomer every other year.

However, these commercial yards don’t have comparable construction-plus-repair capacity today, so when we look to add the recent demand for American yards to build submarines for Australia as part of the AUKUS deal, in addition to the use of private yards to take up the slack in the repair schedule, the commercial-yard option is a nonstarter. We need the commercial, private yards to focus on new ship construction. No, the math conclusively shows that the Navy now needs at least one additional public Navy yard.

That calculation doesn’t account for the Navy’s plan to expand the fast-attack force by 20 boats over the next generation. This will also increase scheduled maintenance requirements, and then there are the unscheduled events, such as the recent collision of the USS Connecticut with an underwater sea mount or, more ominously, any potential battle damage.

The Navy will find a solution to bring some, if not all, of the Bremerton dry docks back online, but given that the fleet is already over 1,000 days behind on its submarine maintenance, with over a third of its undersea fleet sidelined, we can be sure that these bad numbers will only get worse in the interim. At the end of the Cold War the government rationalized the shipbuilding and maintenance industrial base to both maintain minimal capacity and to achieve optimal efficiency in the process. This worked well for about 20 years — as long as the nation did not have any peer competitors or significant national-security threats. Since 2010, however, when the rise of China as a challenger at sea emerged, this efficiency-focused minimum-capacity industrial base model has been rendered obsolete. What is required now is a return to an industrial-base policy that focuses on significantly increased repair capacity, with efficiency in mind but not of paramount importance. The paradigm must immediately shift from efficiency to effective capacity as the goal. The nation needs at least two more public Navy yards.