A veteran Washington naval analyst, on hearing of the latest shipbuilding problem at Northrop Grumman's Newport News yard, paraphrased Ian Fleming in the novel "Goldfinger."
"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action. If I were the Navy, I would be concerned to make sure there aren't more problems waiting to be discovered."
The Virginia shipyard builds nuclear warships for the U.S. Navy. It shares equally in building Virginia-class attack submarines with General Dynamics Electric Boat, and is the only yard in the world capable of building full-size nuclear aircraft carriers.
But both sides of the Newport News shipbuilding house have suffered embarrassments in recent months. The submarine program's latest blow involves - literally - a nuts-and-bolts quality issue in the torpedo room. In May, a welding inspector was caught falsifying reports, and since December 2007, the company has been working to revamp and upgrade its welding processes following the discovery that the wrong kinds of welding filler material had been used on some jobs.
The carrier side of Newport News also has had its problems. The shipyard had three carriers to deliver this year - one new ship, the George H.W. Bush, and two major overhauls, the Carl Vinson and the Enterprise. For a variety of reasons, all three carriers were late. The case of the Bush was particularly embarrassing - outgoing President George W. Bush wanted to attend the commissioning while he was still president, meaning the ceremony was held in January before the ship was officially accepted by the Navy. Although Newport News worked hard to deliver the flattop, it wasn't until May 11 that the official handover took place.
So are these isolated events, or is there a more systemic problem at Newport News?
"I don't know if there's something going on, but it's certainly fair to ask the question," one Capitol Hill source said.
"Of the three things that happened [with the submarine program], they're all kind of different, all have different causes and effects. But certainly Newport News executives and the government should be asking if they have a systemic problem."
"My gut answer is: No, they don't," the source said. "One of the problems with having a really robust quality control program is you find stuff and you have problems. The culture there has already been pretty robust."
The Navy's officer in charge of submarine construction agreed.
"It's certainly a fair question," Capt. Michael Jabaley, program manager for the Virginia-class submarines, said Aug. 21. "My answer is no, I would not call it a systemic problem at Newport News."
Jabaley noted that the company lost expertise during the decade between the end of the previous Los Angeles-class construction and the 1997 start of the Virginia class. Meanwhile, Electric Boat continued to build submarines, although at a slower pace.
"Over 10 years, you have Electric Boat continually improving their performance, and Newport News did not have that work going on," Jabaley said. "They have been working to regain that. These events show areas where their processes can be improved, [but] I wouldn't consider the inspector to be a process problem, that was a particular individual."
The head of the shipyard also is looking for answers.
"We ask those questions ourselves. We do a self-assessment and we look for those connections," said Matt Mulherin, general manager of the Newport News shipyard. "We don't see any connections, any systemic problems."
The weld wire problem "was a process issue," Mulherin said. "We have made huge changes in process, done lots of training, made significant headway."
The welding inspector "was just a case of a bad apple," he said.
Of the new nuts-and-bolts issue, Mulherin said, "It's too early to tell what the cause is right now. Certainly it appears to be a workmanship issue," to discover the cause, he added.
The scale of Northrop Grumman's shipbuilding, observers noted, allows the company more chances to encounter problems. Newport News builds all the aircraft carriers and half the submarines for the Navy, while the company's sister shipyards on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico - Ingalls at Pascagoula, Miss., and Avondale at New Orleans, - build all of the Navy's amphibious ships, about half of the destroyers, and all of the Coast Guard's new large cutters.
"We use a million pounds of weld wire a year and nobody else even comes close to those numbers," Mulherin acknowledged. But he dismissed the excuse that more ships means more problems.
"We don't allow ourselves that simple answer," he said. "We've certainly talked about a campaign where we want to be defect-free every day and everywhere." ■
The Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program is ready to test a few components that soldiers may have in their hands by 2010.
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