Despite the pledge of support from some lawmakers, the amphibious warfare community is trying to drive down the cost of building and maintaining its amphibious ship fleet in the hopes that the money saved could be funneled toward building more ships.
During the kickoff event for the Amphibious Warship Industrial Base Coalition, industry representatives came to the Cannon House Office Building to meet with lawmakers and congressional and military staffs to discuss the state of the amphib fleet–as industry and some members of Congress are pushing for the Navy to build a 12th amphibious transport dock ship in a planned 11-LPD class, and the Marine Corps hopes to use the LPD design for its dock landing ship replacement despite pressure in the Navy’s shipbuilding budget to find a cheaper alternative.
Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.), who represents the region around Naval Station Mayport, assured the attendees during his keynote speech that limiting the number of new amphibs to be constructed is bad for national security and bad for the industrial base.
He said, in his view, it is hard to prioritize one ship in the Navy’s plan over another, but it is easy to prioritize national defense over other spending–essentially arguing for a higher topline for the Defense Department, something that some lawmakers have pushed for given that the Navy is looking at spending about $19 billion a year in upcoming years in its shipbuilding account compared to a historical average of closer to $14 billion a year.
“I’m going to continue to make the case with my colleagues as a senior member of the defense appropriations–I’ll work with my chairman, Rodney Frelinghuysen, and we’ll make the case that we’ve got to stay strong, that we can’t afford to lose the industrial base that we have,” he said.
Still, Maj. Gen. Robert Walsh, the director of amphibious warfare on the chief of naval operations’ staff (OPNAV N95), spoke of the need to control costs wherever possible.
On the new construction side, Walsh said that the industrial base keeping its costs down would help the Marine Corps in its push to use a higher-end design, such as the LPD design, instead of caving to budget pressures and choosing a lower-capability, lower-cost alternative. He urged suppliers large and small to “really work to try to drive out cost and look at the best ways, all the way down to the subsystem level, and [look at] how you would do things differently to reduce the costs of the ships. That’s critical for us to be able to afford the warship that that the Marine Corps needs.”
On the ship maintenance and modernization side, he argued that finding efficiencies in how the service maintains a ready fleet would not only provide more presence, but it would also save money–that the Marines could argue should be used to buy additional ships.
“The smarter we can be in doing things right on our maintenance and our availabilities, getting these things scheduled in the shipyards correctly–there’s a lot of inefficiencies on our part,” Walsh said. “Some of that inefficiency on our part is because the ships are high-demand and they’re run hard. I think in the last two years every [Amphibious Ready Group/Marine Expeditionary Unit] we sent out has either gone out early or stayed late…What that affects is maintenance.”
He said the Army and Marine Corps ground forces had slowed the pace of operations coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan and could therefore reset their equipment, but the Navy has not been given the same slow in tempo to reset its ship fleet.
Adm. William Gortney, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, announced last month the Navy’s Carrier Strike Groups would move to a new Optimized Fleet Response Plan, which would consist of an 8-month deployment and a 26-month maintenance and training cycle at home. Maintenance would be planned well in advanced and not altered when combatant commanders inevitably ask for more overseas presence–the O-FRP would be a supply-based system rather than a demand-based system for readiness.
Walsh said the current O-FRP only applied to CSGs and that a separate schedule would be developed to meet both Navy and Marine Corps personnel and training schedules, as well as maintenance schedules for both the ships and the Marines’ aviation and ground platforms.
“Right now, Fleet Forces Command and MARFORCOM, Marine Forces Command down in Norfolk, are starting discussions on what that would look like,” he told Defense Daily. “But the intent of Adm. Gortney is to get after that, let’s lock these [maintenance] periods in, we don’t mess around with them, and give these shipbuilders” more predictability.
Asked if that predictability, and therefore lowered cost, would be sufficient to pay for his hopes of buying more ships, Walsh responded, “potentially. I think so. I think there’s a lot to be said that we can squeeze a lot more money and get more readiness. Get more readiness, get more ships deployed–trained and deployed–that’s one. Or save money to put it in other areas. And my thing is, if you don’t do this, you’re not going to be able to buy more ships.”
For industry, though, the idea of lowering costs for the Navy and Marine Corps hinges on whether military officials can follow through on their promises of more predictable schedules. Phil Jiannine, the Norfolk branch manager for W&O Supply, Inc., spoke at the event and noted several industry challenges, including the risk of relying on Navy shipbuilding plans in an environment when long-term plans never seem to stick.
“Inventory is about turning over materials and materials movement,” he said. “So if you’re going to make a capital investment to put product on the shelf, then you have to know that that product is going to turn…Today, with all the unknowns, everybody is kind of hesitant to carry that inventory on the shelves.”