The sponsor of a provision in the House Armed Services Committee’s (HASC) draft of the fiscal year 2025 defense authorization bill said the panel is seeking 100 percent design before lead ship construction due to frustration with some Navy decisions and bureaucracy.
“This really, I think, is the result of the continued frustration that I think the subcommittee and our professional staff and members have had in terms of seeing programs that were not ready for primetime getting into actual production and then having to call timeout, because of the fact that there were just design areas that just were not complete,” Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), ranking member of the HASC Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee, told reporters Thursday.
He sponsored an amendment in the subcommittee’s en block set of amendments that requires the Navy to have the first ship in a class have its design finished at 100 percent and certify with Congress before construction can start (Defense Daily, May 22).
Courtney said since 2020 the law has said a ship has to have a “complete design” but there have still been instances where plans were thrown off course “because of the fact that there was just premature construction that was going on. So the 100 percent add-on, which I mean, that literally was the real change in statute that was included in this measure, really was to try and just make sure that we’re not seeing these kinds of stop-start situations.”
He noted the committee still encourages open architecture on the new ships, so parts of a ship can still easily get some modifications and upgrades.
Courtney said the Littoral Combat Ship is the poster child for why this kind of change is needed, with a lack of final design completion causing major problems.
“That has been sort of one of the most painful experiences I’ve had on [the Seapower subcommittee] over the years. And again, it was a situation where they just had never sort of come down and settled on either design…that’s been haunting the Navy ever since.”
While the Columbia-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine was touted as 83 percent design complete as a high water mark before construction started, he argued it was closer to 100 percent once General Dynamics [GD] Electric Boat started creating modular units at its Quonset Point, R.I. facility, so it is not the same kind of example.
Notably, this provision is moving forward amid results of a Navy Secretary shipbuilding report that found delays in the Constellation-class frigate pushed back delivery of the first ship by three years due to shipyard workforce issues and the design stuck at 80 percent for over a year (Defense Daily, April 3).
Courtney said while he supports the frigate program the design being incomplete and the program now delayed three years with workforce issues means that, “I think, is an example of where going into production before the design was really settled has really hindered you getting the frigate to where it wants to be.”
Courtney compared the LCS problems to success in the design process for the National Maritime Training Ship program under construction at the Philly Shipyard via the Maritime Administration (MARAD).
He argued the agencies and bureaus of the Navy can be pushed to be more agile while comparing that MARAD took a different acquisition approach for the training ships. Notably, he said MARAD used a vessel contract manager as in the private sector that “used a very kind of syncopated sort of approach to hull design and repetition to really – would get design complete at the outset, to get to a place where now that program will deliver the sixth ship on time and within budget.”
Courtney noted these MARAD ships are sizeable at 600 feet long, so they are comparable to some Navy efforts.
He said the committee is looking at using a similar approach to push the Navy to recapitalize its sealift fleet, which has “really struggled for a long time and I do think sometimes it’s just because of that bureaucracy…kind of over complicated some of the different ideas to recapitalize sealift.”
Courtney hoped the 100 percent design approach will be “viewed as a positive incentive for the Navy to really start addressing…sort of almost overthinking and overcomplicating design and construction in the acquisition area.”