The Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified several facets of Navy shipbuilding programs that cause it to design and deliver ships significantly slower than commercial industry.
The office said there is a “notable contrast” between the design and construction cycle times for lead Navy ships compared to commercial ships such that the longer time for the government challenges a ship’s business case as threats and mission needs change over time.
The GAO report, “Navy Shipbuilding: Increased Use of Leading Design Practices Could Improve Timeliness of Deliveries,” noted the Navy’s process to establish capability requirements for new vessels is quite different from commercial processes because it uses a “protracted process to solidify requirements in the capability development document (CDD) prior to contract award for detail design and lead ship construction.”
The requirements setting process leads to significant time to pass before the Navy program can move on to the detail design and construction phase. GAO noted it took more than four years for the Navy to start pursuing the Arleigh Burke-class DDG-51 Flight III until the programs CDD was validated, with two years between Navy CDD approval and the Joint Requirements Oversight Council’s CDD validation.
However, DoD guidance said CDD review and validation should take no more than 103 days.
“Our prior work reviewing this process found that none of the DoD programs we reviewed completed the process within this time. That work also found a variety of issues that could affect the length of elapsed time, with the comment adjudication period cited by Joint Staff officials as the biggest contributor to the length of reviews.”
Moreover, the Navy’s guidance includes a gate review after detail design and construction award to endorse CDD updates, but does not require the service to proactively continue to assess the business case supporting the approval capability requirements as a program progresses.
“The lack of such a requirement limits formal opportunities to identify changes that could improve the capability delivered to the fleet. It also increases the risk of the Navy investing resources in ship designs with capabilities that are no longer needed,” the report said.
GAO found the requirements setting process can prematurely create parameters leading to inefficient cost and schedule pressures later on.
It cited the case of the Littoral Combat Ship program and its combining gear to run both diesel and gas turbine engines together for maximum speed. The original ships did not meet the original design speed and range expectations, so the combining gear was needed even though Navy officials later determined the top speed was “not essential to mission performance.”
The LCS propulsion system ultimately led to major challenges like engine failures and mechanical problems stemming from the combining gear.
“The lack of flexibility to modify requirements resulted in significant challenges and ships that were unable to meet those same requirements,” GAO said.
GAO also underscored the Navy uses a longer and more linear approach to design and deliver ships as opposed to the iterative commercial design practices.
This means the Navy locks down requirements early on, with development then seeking to comply with original requirements. The service also puts an emphasis on designing and delivering extensive and novel capabilities on lead ships, “with reduced emphasis on the length of time needed to deliver the ship compared to commercial practices.”
This process adds time, so the Flight III DDGs took 14 years from starting to pursue the ship to lead ship delivery.
Notably, GAO said while the DoD policy requirement is that shipbuilding programs receive approval for acquisition program baselines before awarding a detail design and construction contract for the lead ship, the Navy does not usually work with the shipbuilders to achieve design stability before setting baseline requirements.
Therefore, the Navy “commonly defers significant amounts of basic and functional design work—which provides such stability—until after the detail design and construction contract awards.”
This leads to important decisions or shipbuilding programs to be informed by less design knowledge than what commercial ship buyers and builders expect before entering into contracts.
The report also said the Navy and its shipbuilders have less direct communications before contract awards than commercial buyers and builders. Specifically, the shipbuilders may communicate less openly to preserve competitive interests if the primary way to communicate with the Navy is via requests for proposals and those are publicly available.
However, GAO said less early communication “increases the risk of shipbuilders and the Navy experiencing challenges post-award due to a lack of common understanding about requirements.”
The report acknowledged the Navy has sought to change this in recent programs like the Constellation-class frigate and DDG(X) destroyer by awarding multiple contracts to prospective builders for the early design phase.
Other problems the report identified include the Navy being reluctant to off-ramp approved design innovations for lead ships even when major issues arise rather than deferring to future designs, the service lacking a robust digital design library like that used in the commercial industry to support iterative design, the service takes more time to finalize vendor decisions for systems and receive reliable vendor-furnished information (VFI), lacking streamlines and time-constrained processes while multiple stakeholders have decision-making authority that increase cycle times, and a lack of consistent design maturity and clear connections between those measures and decision-making.
Importantly, the report also underscored the Navy has significant shortfall in in-house design workforce and tools, including 3D modeling difficulties.
“We found commercial ship buyers and builders and the Navy and its builders using a range of digital 3D modeling applications to mature ship designs. Similar to commercial companies in our review, Navy shipbuilders we spoke with noted significant advancements in recent years with 3D modeling capabilities and the integration of design data from other systems in the models,” the report said.
However, GAO said shipbuilding programs encounter more problems integrating 3D modeling with other systems due to incompatible systems and continuing use of 2D design information for legacy ship classes, like Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Virginia-class submarines.
“These programs used less sophisticated digital design technologies or methods to document their ship design before the rise of 3D modeling capabilities,” GAO said.
Using 2D design information then causes the Navy program to face risks that issues are obscured but would otherwise be caught in 3D designs, which are also more flexible to be accessed and assessed by multiple users.
Navy shipbuilders also told GAO the timeliness of VFI receipt affected 3D modeling completion.
“Specifically, Navy shipbuilders told us that their ability to capitalize on the opportunities that design tools offer to expedite ship design maturity is predicated on the timely receipt of reliable VFI, which regularly is not achieved. Without it, the 3D modeling is held back by the risk of design changes from unstable information on ship equipment.”
Ultimately, GAO recommended several measures to improve opportunities to improve shipbuilding outcomes. This focused on improving consistency and communication of ship design maturity measures supporting decisions to start construction, ensuring validated requirements reflect operational needs before proceeding with construction, increasing design maturity levels before detail design and construction contract awards and making decisions on cost and schedule expectations, ensuring consistent and direct user involvement throughout the ship design process, improved processes and resources to streamline decision-making by ensuring stakeholder involvement matches the significance of a decision, and improving Navy digital design resources.