To Secure Peace, Prepare for War
America’s aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines are arguably the best investment in human history. They allow the United States to project power to every corner of the globe, protecting sea lanes, deterring our adversaries from aggressive conflict, providing an unassailable nuclear deterrent, keeping open critical straits and canals, and enabling rapid humanitarian responses to crises.
The strength of the United States Navy has been critical to ensuring relative peace around the world over more than seventy years. There is no doubt that building and maintaining nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, and their escorts and support ships is expensive. However, considering ongoing threats by the Chinese over Taiwan and the broader Pacific, there are two choices available to us. Either the United States can invest in proper maintenance, modernization, and expansion for the Navy, or we can choose to save money right now. The second choice would mean we are unable to defend critical interests within the next decade.
U.S. Navy wargaming has resulted in estimates that the Navy needs a minimum of 355 ships to counter China and Russia. According to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday, “based on the top-line that we have, we can afford a Navy of about 300 ships.” Clearly, more funding for more ships is needed for the United States to avoid the catastrophic expense of a Navy that is very good…but not quite good enough. Before we can consider rapidly expanding the Navy to the size that it needs to be however, we need to address the elephant in the room: To support the Navy we have now, let alone the Navy we need, our public shipyards need dramatically more personnel, money, and resources.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is clear on this point, with a report on the Public Shipyards stating “75% of planned maintenance periods were completed late for aircraft carriers and submarines in FY 2015-2019, with an average delay of 113 days for carriers and 225 days for submarines.”
The GAO found that some shops within the shipyards were forced to rely on as much as 45% overtime because there simply are not enough hands to do the job. The GAO also found that average idle times before it was even possible to begin maintenance had increased from 100 days to 1019 days from 2015 to 2019, an increase of 919 percent. It is worth noting that this maintenance delay is occurring without conflict with near-peer adversaries like China or Russia. In a world where our adversaries have hypervelocity missiles specifically designed to kill carriers, it is a safe assumption that in the event of a war maintenance requirements would increase dramatically. Skilled workers and technicians do not grow on trees, however. They take time and money to hire and train. The U.S. must make the necessary investments in these capabilities before the critical moment of necessity. The Chinese certainly have been.
Shipyards are reliant on large amounts of overtime and are regularly and increasingly behind schedule. This is indicative of two things. First, that the federal employees at our four public shipyards are working heroically to accomplish their critical missions despite lacking enough resources and personnel to meet the schedules imposed. That they have managed to do as good a job as they have with the resources at their disposal is extremely impressive and should be recognized as such. At a certain point however, no amount of hard work and can-do spirit can make the lack of resources cease to matter. A 2017 GAO report found that the average piece of heavy shipyard equipment had already passed its useful lifetime, contributing to further delays and needs for modernization. A baker might be the most motivated baker in the world, but if you don’t give them eggs, sugar, or flour, you shouldn’t be shocked when the result isn’t exactly what you were hoping for.
Now for the good news. We know exactly how to fix this problem. The Navy in general, and the public shipyards in particular, need more money. The Navy’s modernization plan for the public shipyards calls for 21 billion dollars in additional funding. That is why FMA has strongly endorsed the SHIPYARD Act, bipartisan legislation introduced in the Senate (S. 1441) by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) and in the House (H.R. 2860) by Rep. Rob Wittman. The investment is significant, but the cost of inaction will be exponentially greater.
Once the existing shipyard facilities have been modernized, funding will be needed for shipyard expansion to provide capacity that will be critically needed to provide wartime capacity, and capacity for an expanded Navy that meets the needs of American national security. FMA recognizes that there is little appetite for additional spending in Congress. We suggest that legislators consider which they would prefer to have to explain: approving additional funding to secure peace and security, or why they voted against spending enough to ensure the Navy could win a widely anticipated war in the Pacific. It seems very likely that the choice will be a binary one.
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The views reflected in this column are those of FMA and do not necessarily represent the views of FEDmanager. To learn more about the Federal Managers Association (FMA), visit their website: FedManagers.org.