Quick Hits (Express Drift): The Drift, S. II, Vol. XXXV

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Navigation Brief

This is an e-newsletter originally published on August 20, 2020.

I-95 SOUTH, OUTSIDE OF NEW YORK – Good Afternoon, Drifters

I’m checking in ever so briefly from Vacationland to send an express version of The Drift. I’ve got a few things I’d like to round up here that caught my attention, so this issue will be a little bit of a blend of Navigation Brief and Hotwash.

For observant Drifters, you’ll note that I indeed promised a special Drift this week and I have failed to deliver. My apologies, I have said treat in store for next week.

Let’s Drift!

-DBL

EXPRESS DRIFT

Maintenance Update:

The GAO is out today with a new and depressing report on the state of the public shipyards. Last week, we dug into a report by Maiya Clark at Heritage that detailed the Navy’s house-of-cards approach to fixing the shipyards’ woes. GAO drives the point home.

Read it Here: Actions Needed to Address the Main Factors Causing Maintenance Delays for Aircraft Carriers and Submarines

Key Points:

• The Navy’s four shipyards completed 38 of 51 (75 percent) maintenance periods late for aircraft carriers and submarines with planned completion dates in fiscal years 2015 through 2019, for a combined total of 7,424 days of maintenance delay.
• For each maintenance period completed late, the shipyards averaged 113 days late for aircraft carriers and 225 days late for submarines.
• Unplanned work and workforce factors—such as shipyard workforce performance and capacity (having enough people to perform the work)—were the main factors GAO identified as causing maintenance delays for aircraft carriers and submarines.
• GAO is making three recommendations to the Navy, including updating workforce planning requirements to avoid the consistent use of overtime; completing the development of shipyard performance metrics; and developing and implementing goals, action plans, milestones, and monitoring results. The Navy concurred with all three recommendations.

Always Crashing the Same Car

The discussion around the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel is one I find pretty frustrating. Every time someone convinces me that the issues around operating an unmanned missile magazine designed to operate alongside a strike group is achievable, I start asking myself: Well, how do we make that affordable? Navy ships are expensive because they must be globally deployable and that means money. Oh, and you are doing all that in an unmanned surface vessel, which means short of war there really is no use for these things. So where are they going to be kept? And, oh by the way, nothing like this has ever been done before.

So it was enormously refreshing to speak with a naval architect who has studied these things to hear him say precisely that: This is a big ask of the Navy engineering community.

See this quote.

Excerpt: “It’s important to note that where the commercial industry is going is different from where the Navy wants to go,” said Matthew Collette, an associate professor of naval architecture and marine engineering at the University of Michigan. “In the commercial marine industry, you have a licensed captain ashore who is able to teleport to the ship whenever it needs human intervention. And we’re really talking about short runs, like inter-European runs of six hours, 12 hours, and working their way out from there.

“The Navy has really asked for a much harder, much more difficult problem. And you could see how something like the [extra-large unmanned underwater vehicle] as a technology trail that works toward this direction, but jumping toward something like large unmanned surface vessel, is a big, big step with a lot of risk.”

Read the whole article here: In developing robot warships, US Navy wants to avoid another littoral combat ship

Is this Good News?

Despite a historic string of bad headlines, the shine hasn’t come off the Navy just yet in terms of how the public perceives the service.

Sam LaGrone at USNI with the reporting:

Excerpt: In the summary data, confirmed by Navy officials, the general opinion of the service has remained steady over the last decade despite a string of high-profile accidents and controversies in recent years.

Since 2009, the Navy has maintained a 76- to 82-percent approval rating with the American public that has been largely unaffected by episodes like the fatal collisions in the Western Pacific in 2017, the ongoing fallout in the service from the federal corruption case against Leonard Francis, a string of incidents in the last several years involving members of the Naval Special Warfare community, and the COVID-19 outbreak aboard carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71).

“We here in the Pentagon and D.C., we can very easily get myopically focused on what people in the Beltway are saying and what people in … the op-ed pages are saying,” Chief of Naval Information Rear Adm. Charlie Brown told USNI News in an interview last week.

“It is interesting when we see that the confidence levels in the Navy’s capabilities remain high in the American public. That’s positive and we’re happy about that.”

The survey was conducted in June, ahead of the pier-side fire on amphibious warship USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6)

Additionally, the inside-the-Beltway frustrations of Congress over the Pentagon’s and Navy’s lack of a shipbuilding plan have not affected how the public perceives the service. According to the survey, 70 percent of Americans were unaware the Navy was seeking to build a fleet of 355 ships.

Read the whole thing here: Survey: Navy’s Recent Woes Aren’t Affecting American Opinion of Service

I suppose it’s good to be reminded every so often that the vast majority of the public doesn’t read or care to read what I write.

All right, Drifters. Back to Vacationland. I’ll see you next week!

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