What Passes as Cleaning Up Shipbuilding These Days

Chris Cavas has a report that suggests there may be some contract trading in the works between Bath Iron Works and Ingalls Shipyard.

Four years after Congress ripped apart a U.S. Navy winner-take-all scheme for building new DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyers, the service and its two chief shipbuilders might be poised for a scaled-down agreement to shift construction of the first two ships from each shipyard to just one yard.

The result would be that the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard in Bath, Maine - poised to begin fabrication of DDG 1000 in February could wind up building that ship and DDG 1001, the Michael Monsour.

Northrop Grumman's Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., scheduled to begin fabrication of DDG 1001 this fall, would in turn receive more of the additional DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers the Navy now intends to build.

Chris Cavas covers a lot of detail, the full article is interesting.

The construction for the DDG-1000 is already very complicated, so who knows what a change to that plan will do. The plan developed to build seven DDG-1000s was for each yard to build 25% of each ship, the idea being to consolidate costs and lessons learned for those sections by keeping that construction to a single shipyard. The remaining 50% of the work would be built at one of the two shipyards. In other words, DDG-1000 was to have 75% of the ship built in Maine and 25% in Mississippi, while DDG-1001 would have 75% of the ship build in Mississippi and 25% in Maine. They would alternate through all seven. Would this save money? Nobody knows, this was the process developed when the Navy was denied the option to have a single yard build all seven DDG-1000s.

Doesn't matter now. This new idea appears to be smart, although anytime you make changes there is potential for cost growth, although believe it or not, neither the CBO and GAO has reported any cost for the DDG-1000 despite all the expectations there will be.

One thought on this. If someone at SNA did not ask McCullough what the cost of a DDG-1000 is on the record in front of that audience, you missed a real opporunity. McCullough is very smart, how he would answer that question in front of that audience would be very revealing regarding what the Navy knows in terms of the potential true cost of DDG-1000.

The article goes on to note the third DDG-1000 is a problem, because while only partially paid for so far, it does not appear that ship is not on the table in these negotiations.

While it is a lot of fun to observe this shipbuilding program and that shipbuilding program and debate the details of this or that design, to be honest, I find it depressing as well. Can somone show me the linkage between strategy and shipbuilding? It isn't a complicated question, but the answer appears to be too complicated to highlight examples.

The leadership in the Navy today appears to operate on some philosophical level of relativism in terms of vision. Until they can articulate where they are going, they will never leave any observer an impression they know what they are doing. The mess in Navy shipbuilding is a daily reminder of just how little vision or planning that can be linked between spending and strategy.

Consider how shallow the Navy's intellectual case is in shipbuilding these days,. First, we don't cancel the DDG-1000 because of its high cost, instead citing "strategic reasons" to Congress why we should build the DDG-51. At the same time, the Navy leadership runs around in the media saying "we need to build more Littoral Combat Ships" specifically because it is low cost, while ignoring the chorus of concern about the LCS's very strange combination of speed, space, low survivability, lack of armament, and littoral operating environment which represents the most dangerous part of the sea. In today's Navy, talking about enormously expensive big ships is strategy, but talking about low cost littoral platforms is economics. Is it just me, or does that seem backwards in todays strategic and economic environment?

As much as I hate to suggest, absence in leadership as it relates to shipbuilding is probably a good reason the Obama administration is not willing to simply throw money in the direction of the Navy for more ships. While they might do it for purposes of industry or economy, the Navy has given them no reason based on strategy.