The Navy’s new policy for ship inspections will more comprehensively and at greater depth examine the state of the vessel’s systems, including guns and other weapons, as well as information technology and cyber defense, the service’s top ship inspector said Friday.
“We are increasing the breadth and scope and rigor of the material inspection of more assets and elements in greater detail than in previous processes,” Rear Adm. Robert Wray, the president of the Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV), told reporters on a conference call.
“This includes things like additional gun shoots, cyber, IT and IS–information technology and information systems–and ballistic missile defense,” he said.
Wray announced new changes to the inspection program a day earlier. They are designed to provide a better reflection of the readiness of the fleet, and to increase the integration of pre-deployment preparations and inspections (Defense Daily, Jan. 4 2013).
Among the key changes are doubling the frequency of exhaustive inspections from once every five years to once every 30 months and implementing a new grading system for rating ships, Wray said. Wray said on the call that the high operational tempo of Navy ships in recent years has contributed to an overall need to ensure that ships are “ready to go.”
“I do not believe that the high-op tempo drove us to increase the number of inspections by itself, but the high-op temp indirectly is pushing us to become more efficient and more intelligent about how we use our assets,” he said.
“A high-op temp means that ships have to have a higher average level of readiness than they did before,” Wray added.
Wray said with the higher operational tempo INSURV has been working “very hard” to be flexible in scheduling inspections, given that some ships deploy earlier than planned and for longer periods of time than expected.
Wray said INSURV is adding 13 additional inspectors to help shoulder the load of sea trials to bring the size of his inspection team to 80. Each inspection takes more than 3 days, he said.
Under the new policy, INSURV inspectors will conduct the usual “material inspection” during a ship and crew’s fleet readiness plan (FRP) cycle, and the second one in the inspection cycle will be carried out by the type commander with INSURV support, the board said.
The new grading system eliminates declaring a ship “satisfactory,” “degraded” or “unsatisfactory,” in favor of a model that takes a weighted average of 30 scores to quantify the overall readiness of a ship, and rates it on a scale of 1-100, Wray said.