The head of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) on Thursday said that increased Navy maintenance funds will help the fleet grow to 355 ships over a decade faster than through just procurement.
Vice Adm. Thomas Moore, commander of NAVSEA, said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event, that the Navy is looking at extending surface vessel service lives for another five to ten years each.
This examination looks to accelerate the timeline for the Navy’s goal of 355 ships as noted in the Chief of Naval Operations’ (CNO) future vision paper (Defense Daily, May 17). This additional service life would work in tandem with increased procurement after the fiscal year 2018 Navy budget to reach 355 ships 10 to15 years faster than only through pure procurement.
Moore said a key component to getting to the larger fleet is extending the service life of the guided missile destroyers, cruisers, and amphibious vessels. Most of them currently have a 30-35 year service life range but the Navy is looking to see what it would take to add another five to 10 years to that.
“And the reality is for a steel hull, if you do the maintenance, you can get the service life out much longer. And with today’s open architecture and vertical launch I think there’s great opportunity for us to make the… relatively small investment to keep the ships around longer than we have today,” Moore said.
He noted that while surface ships have not served for over 35 years, aircraft carriers have a 50-year lifespan.
“And the reason we do that is because we consistently do all the maintenance that you have to do on an aircraft carrier to get to 50 years. So we know how to do this and I think what you’re going to see is we’re going to take a very serious look at taking the service life of the existing fleet and extending it out five to 10 years,” Moore added.
If the Navy can extend the fleet like that, it can probably accelerate total fleet growth by about 10 to 15 years with a relatively small investment over about a 30 year period, he said.