Overhaul7: Navy Maintenance Problems1
Introduction
I’m changing direction slightly with this post. Instead of describing overhaul from the perspective of the shipyard (SY), which I doubt non-SY workers would find interesting, I’m going to analyze information published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on SY performance. What do they say and what can be learned from studying these publications?
If good SY performance is defined as completing overhaul projects on time for the estimated budget, things have not been going well. Note that this is not necessarily the best definition of success for SY maintenance, which is something that drives people crazy outside of the SY. That is a topic for a future post, however.
In this first of a series of posts on problems with Navy ship maintenance and recommendations for improvement from the perspective of the GAO, I discuss how the GAO does its investigations, list the GAO publications I studied, and provide an introduction to a representative GAO document with the scary title, NAVY MAINTENANCE-Persistent and Substantial Ship and Submarine Maintenance Delays, GAO-20-257T (Dec 2019).
GAO Investigations
The GAO is a tool of the U.S. Congress that studies problems assigned by members of Congress or as required by legislation. According to their documents, they follow the standard consultant-investigator model: read official correspondence, review metrics, talk to a lot of people (non-attribution), draft recommendations (usually better metrics), solicit comments on their draft report from the victims organization studied, incorporate the comments in the final report, testify before Congress, and issue the report noting concurrence or rejection with their recommendations and status on actions taken.
There are problems with promising anonymity when interviewing people that impact the GAO just like any other group. You can argue that people won’t be candid on the record for fear of retribution. The problem is people providing information anonymously can lie obfuscate or provide self-serving versions of events. Without costly and time-consuming corroboration, any individual testimony is suspect and thus any findings and recommendations based on it. In many cases, a reader has no way to know if this was done or how effective it was.
While the lack of deep expertise in the area investigated can be a hindrance, it also has the potential for producing insight. My favorite GAO publication demonstrating unexpected insight is “Navy Aircraft Carriers: Cost-Effectiveness of Conventionally and Nuclear-Powered Carriers,” NSIAD-98-1 (Aug 27, 1998). Lifecycle and maintenance costs aside (big advantage for conventionally-powered aircraft carriers, no surprise), the GAO concluded that there was NO difference in their effectiveness. The Combat Commander staff personnel they interviewed said that the carrier’s propulsion system was irrelevant to the missions they assigned. The report was noteworthy because of the GAO’s pragmatic approach as well as supremely entertaining because of the strong reaction it generated at one particular organization within the Naval Sea Systems Command (the un-attributed objection was duly noted in an appendix of the publication, read it for yourself).
GAO Publications on Shipyards and Navy Ship Maintenance
The GAO has published many documents on ship maintenance since 2014. Not everything the GAO publishes or testifies about to Congress is the result of an investigation based on data. I selected NAVY MAINTENANCE-Persistent and Substantial Ship and Submarine Maintenance Delays, GAO-20-257T (Dec 2019) to analyze because it is a good summary of many other GAO publications. It was “based on previously published work from 2015 through 2019 on Navy maintenance, ship acquisition, crew size, ship maintenance and deployment schedules, the condition of Naval shipyards, and recruiting skilled maintenance personnel” (Highlights section of the document). If you want to understand Navy maintenance delays, those are a good things to study.
Other GAO publications reviewed (many were referenced in GAO-20-257T):
GAO-15-329 Navy Force Structure: Sustainable Plan and Comprehensive Assessment Needed to Mitigate Long-Term Risks to Ships Assigned to Overseas Homeports, May 2015
GAO-16-466R Military Readiness: Progress and Challenges in Implementing the Navy's Optimized Fleet Response Plan, May 2016
GAO-17-413 Navy Force Structure: Actions Needed to Ensure Proper Size and Composition of Ship Crews, May 2017
GAO-20-2 Navy Shipbuilding: Increasing Focus on Sustainment Early in the Acquisition Process Could Save Billions, Mar 2020
GAO-20-588 Navy Shipyards: Actions Needed to Address the Main Factors Causing Maintenance Delays for Aircraft Carriers and Submarines, Aug 2020
GAO-21-66 Navy Maintenance: Navy Report [of July 2020] Did Not Fully Address Causes of Delays or Results-Oriented Elements, Oct 2020
GAO-23-106673 Military Readiness: Improvement in Some Areas, but Sustainment and Other Challenges Persist, May 2023
Navy Ship Maintenance Delays GAO-20-257T (Dec 2019)
The GAO statement provided “information on the
(1) magnitude of maintenance delays for Navy ships and submarines,
(2) factors contributing to maintenance delays, and
(3) Navy’s efforts to address these factors” (pp.1-2)
“From fiscal year 2014 to the end of fiscal year 2019, Navy ships have spent over 33,700 more days in maintenance than expected. The Navy was unable to complete scheduled ship maintenance on time for about 75 percent of the maintenance periods” (GAO-20-257T Highlights).
The GAO statement noted that “multiple factors … contribute to maintenance delays, including
insufficient shipyard capacity,
shortage of skilled personnel, and
deferred maintenance during operational deployments” (Highlights)
None of these are under SY control. You will see this come up again and again as I write on the topic of Navy ship maintenance delays. The issue of responsibility for the factors influencing ship maintenance delays should be obvious. If you want to DO something about them, you need to know who is responsible.
In this post, I’m going to focus on the three consequences of deferred maintenance according to the GAO: longer overhaul schedules, higher costs, and the possibility of new work. Deferred work equals declining ship conditions-check. This is generally true, although some deferred work is more significant than others. Deferring work to shipyard maintenance periods raises costs-possibly, depending on the details of the work. Not all work can be deferred without impacting a ship’s mission, but some can because ships have a lot of reserve material readiness. This is very useful in combat. Deferred work CAN lead to NEW WORK (i.e., work that wasn’t known in advance) in the shipyard-perhaps. It all depends on the work. The GAO statement doesn’t provide an example and neither do the three previous reports cited for the claim (GAO-16-466R, GAO-17-413, and GAO-15-329).
Deferring work likely only leads to new work if
a) it is done in secret and there is no record so no one outside the ship knows about it (it happens, but not often and the impact is usually minor),
b) if the ship’s maintenance planning activity ignores it (rare since it’s their job not to), and
c) the process for developing the Availability Work Package lacks robust material condition assessment practices (it happens, but not repeatedly).
None of these reflects a shipyard performance problem. While the GAO statement didn’t claim that they did, claiming in the statement Highlights that deferred work is one of three reasons for maintenance delays is a curious choice when so many other options are available.
Deferred work IS a problem for availability schedules determined years in advance based on guesses notional maintenance plans, but planning processes, when followed, can account for it. While deferred work can lengthen time in the SY, is this REALLY a problem? It’s a problem only in a world where maintenance is considered something independent of operations. In the REAL world, ships exist to perform their missions outside of maintenance periods. If you make a deliberate choice to defer maintenance to perform an important mission or surface your submarine under another ship and put a kink in the sail, expect consequences. Rust never sleeps and unkinking a submarine sail isn’t part of the Class Maintenance Plan.
In fairness to the GAO, the statement did not say how much the three factors they listed contributed to maintenance delays. None of the publications before 2020 did so. I’ll have more thoughts on this in a future post.
In my next post, I will analyze more factors cited by the GAO for causing maintenance delays.
