Mabus acknowledged that the budget crisis has put a lot of that progress at risk. The Navy has had to delay repair and maintenance, and anticipated losses in Navy in-service surface ship repair work will result in layoffs, he said. “Anybody can see how these changes will, if allowed to continue and over time, erode our readiness and really hurt our economy.”

“Over the long term, the discretionary budget caps under sequestration will fundamentally change our Navy,” said Vice Chief of Naval Operations Mark Ferguson to a congressional committee in February. “We will be compelled to reduce our force structure, our end strength, and investments as we lower funding levels in the altered landscape of our industrial base.”

To find and fix these problems, the Navy is conducting more thorough inspections of ships before their overhauls. “We are looking harder, and as ships are being drydocked for our rigorous and thorough inspections, we are seeing the impact of the backlog of previously deferred maintenance, particularly with the condition of tanks, voids and other structures driving growth work,” said Commander Naval Sea Systems Command Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy in congressional testimony last March. “We are working through this, but I expect we will continue to see a rise in the growth of maintenance items to be worked for a few years until all of our ships complete their inspection protocols that we have put in place.”

Thus, McCoy said, deferred maintenance eventually costs more to execute due to the impact of increased corrosion and wear, further exacerbating future budget shortfalls. “If not accomplished, repeated deferral of maintenance will result in reduced fleet readiness and shortened service life, ultimately reducing force structure.”

 

Upgrade or outdated

According to Rear Adm. Tom Rowden, director for surface warfare on the Chief of Naval Operations staff, the cost of ships is going up, inflation is going up, the number of ships in the fleet is going down, and the number of new ships is also going down. “All of these indicators are going in the wrong direction,” he says.

“Our ships cost too much,” Rowden says. “If this keeps up, in the future we will not be able to buy ships. We need to put the rudder over and change that.”

Rowden says ships must be kept current or risk becoming obsolete. So the Navy is conducting mid-life modernizations to its surface combatants to upgrade the combat capability. But such upgrades are expensive and time consuming. “It takes too long to take a ship off line to keep them combat relevant,” he says.

“We’ve got to think differently about how we go about doing this; how we field capability, and how we insert capability into the ship,” Rowden says. “The amount of time required to take the ship offline to keep the ship relevant confirmed for me we need to change.”

Bringing Aegis cruisers and destroyers up to the latest “Advanced Capability Build” configuration is a complex process that requires gutting the ship. “I went aboard USS Chancellorsville and USS John Paul Jones at BAE Systems Ship Repair in San Diego and I walked into spaces I didn’t recognize, even though I had been a combat systems officer and XO on a cruiser and commanded a destroyer. To install ACB 12, they had to remove everything,” Rowden says.

The CBO report says “DoD will have to cut back on its forces and activities more each year to remain within the budget caps.”

Delaying these modernizations not only disrupts the ship yard schedule, but prevents the Navy from having ships with the latest combat capability.