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Sinnavuuty

Senior Member
Registered Member
Sounds like the need to re-open/build four new public yards to rebuild the capacity they had in the early 90’s.

Don’t see how they can talk about growing the fleet while having less infrastructure to maintain it then they did during the Cold War?

Seems to me they are in a put up or shut up moment. Start giving realistic costs to actually grow the Navy along with the money required to maintain it, otherwise suck it up, accept a smaller role and move on with a different strategy.
You know what's worse?

The US Navy can outsource repairs to SSNs such as the Boise that went to Huntington-Ingalls Industries' Newport News shipyard in Virginia. This is one of two private shipyards in the country that can do nuclear work — the other is General Dynamics' Electric Boat in New England. Unlike the public shipyards, HASC officials said that these private shipyards would still have some spare capacity, but the next ballistic missile submarine, the Columbia class, has started production and the private shipyards will also be fully occupied. Only public shipyards remain, which, as the article indicates, always prioritized aircraft carriers and SSBNs, respectively in that order, SSNs are in third place in the list of priorities and, if the maintenance of a CVN, for example, delays, it will impact on the maintenance of the SSNs, if maintenance is delayed from SSBNs, maintenance of SSNs will be delayed.

The 2017-2022 window in which the private shipyards had an idle capacity, the US Navy could have optimized the plans and conducted several submarines waiting for maintenance to be worked on in the private shipyards, but if before 2017 the number of submarines to be wait was 15 and now it is 18 units of SSNs with the same problem, this suggests that it was left for that, the bureaucratic inertia impacted in the readiness force of the nuclear attack submarines of the US Navy.

And there are those who say that the US Navy has too many attack submarines, 50 units left over to be tied to aircraft carriers or escorting SSBNs… the reality is quite different, the ideal would be 66 units, without highlighting one for each attack group centered on aircraft carriers... but the number will drop to below 50 units, and this “such a large fleet” is barely handling 80% of the missions because of maintenance, training, new submarines not yet certified for missions, etc. and does not help the great distance they are forced to travel to their patrol areas.

On the west coast is a large installation in Bremerton, not focused on submarines clearly, but equally capable of performing complex maintenance on submarines. There is also another facility at Pearl Harbor, but both are quite busy so much so that there are occasions when Pacific Fleet submarines have to resort to the public shipyard on the east coast, so there is no way out, the two private shipyards will have to absorb some of the work. or the situation will get even more complicated.

This reminds me of a parallel, at the time of the Cold War, under the Reagan administration, the readiness of the US Navy was also not high or in an effective condition to maintain a large operational fleet, even so its administration launched the plan to increase the number of combat ships for 600 units, Reagan almost managed to reach the number of 594 units (the US Navy's own internal numbers were 378 units for that same year, they administratively used a different counting system), however, even with the increase in ships in the "battle fleet", the operational readiness of ships remained the same as before Reagan's naval expansion plan, in some cases even worse.

What I mean is that an expanding navy can have a gigantic fleet but at the same time it may not be able to keep it operational, if this factor is taken to the limit, the Soviets (1964-1985) are the clearest example of this, another example was Reagan himself (1981-1988).
 

SlothmanAllen

Junior Member
Registered Member
You know what's worse?

The US Navy can outsource repairs to SSNs such as the Boise that went to Huntington-Ingalls Industries' Newport News shipyard in Virginia. This is one of two private shipyards in the country that can do nuclear work — the other is General Dynamics' Electric Boat in New England. Unlike the public shipyards, HASC officials said that these private shipyards would still have some spare capacity, but the next ballistic missile submarine, the Columbia class, has started production and the private shipyards will also be fully occupied. Only public shipyards remain, which, as the article indicates, always prioritized aircraft carriers and SSBNs, respectively in that order, SSNs are in third place in the list of priorities and, if the maintenance of a CVN, for example, delays, it will impact on the maintenance of the SSNs, if maintenance is delayed from SSBNs, maintenance of SSNs will be delayed.

The 2017-2022 window in which the private shipyards had an idle capacity, the US Navy could have optimized the plans and conducted several submarines waiting for maintenance to be worked on in the private shipyards, but if before 2017 the number of submarines to be wait was 15 and now it is 18 units of SSNs with the same problem, this suggests that it was left for that, the bureaucratic inertia impacted in the readiness force of the nuclear attack submarines of the US Navy.

And there are those who say that the US Navy has too many attack submarines, 50 units left over to be tied to aircraft carriers or escorting SSBNs… the reality is quite different, the ideal would be 66 units, without highlighting one for each attack group centered on aircraft carriers... but the number will drop to below 50 units, and this “such a large fleet” is barely handling 80% of the missions because of maintenance, training, new submarines not yet certified for missions, etc. and does not help the great distance they are forced to travel to their patrol areas.

On the west coast is a large installation in Bremerton, not focused on submarines clearly, but equally capable of performing complex maintenance on submarines. There is also another facility at Pearl Harbor, but both are quite busy so much so that there are occasions when Pacific Fleet submarines have to resort to the public shipyard on the east coast, so there is no way out, the two private shipyards will have to absorb some of the work. or the situation will get even more complicated.

This reminds me of a parallel, at the time of the Cold War, under the Reagan administration, the readiness of the US Navy was also not high or in an effective condition to maintain a large operational fleet, even so its administration launched the plan to increase the number of combat ships for 600 units, Reagan almost managed to reach the number of 594 units (the US Navy's own internal numbers were 378 units for that same year, they administratively used a different counting system), however, even with the increase in ships in the "battle fleet", the operational readiness of ships remained the same as before Reagan's naval expansion plan, in some cases even worse.

What I mean is that an expanding navy can have a gigantic fleet but at the same time it may not be able to keep it operational, if this factor is taken to the limit, the Soviets (1964-1985) are the clearest example of this, another example was Reagan himself (1981-1988).

Great post!

Another thing I would like to mention is that I feel like even if they were to commit to recommissioning / building four new public yards (the cost would astronomical), who is going to work at them? Convincing someone to work in shipbuilding is a tall order in today's Western world. There are honestly a million different opportunities that provide similar pay rates with a much better work life balance and overall just less demanding work environment. I think that would be very difficult and they would have to recruit very aggressively at the high school level otherwise most people wouldn't want to commit to that lifestyle.
 

Lethe

Captain
USS Anzio (CG-68) has been
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. She is the third Tico to retire this year, with two further retirements pending over the next week or so.

For sportsfans at home, USN currently has 112 surface combatants in active service, consisting of 91 Tico/Burke Large Surface Combatants and 21 Freedom/Independence Littoral Combat Ships.
 

siegecrossbow

General
Staff member
Super Moderator
USS Anzio (CG-68) has been
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. She is the third Tico to retire this year, with two further retirements pending over the next week or so.

For sportsfans at home, USN currently has 112 surface combatants in active service, consisting of 91 Tico/Burke Large Surface Combatants and 21 Freedom/Independence Littoral Combat Ships.

It’s a wise decision. Maintaining large old platforms like this eats into the budget that could be allocated to building more effective modern platforms.
 

SlothmanAllen

Junior Member
Registered Member
Does anybody have any insight into the readiness of Coast Guard vessels? I think it would be interesting to see how they maintain their vessels vs the USN.
 

BoraTas

Captain
Registered Member
Considering the US record with production programs in the last 25 years, I say this plan is unlikely to become a reality.

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2 Virginias and a single Columbia per year will be a doubling of submarine production rate. And it seems even the Virginia program is not without problems. It is considered the best managed US Navy project of recent decades yet:

"Rucker said that the current number of SSNs in maintenance is too high and that sub maintenance is facing challenges in planning availabilities, work execution and keeping enough spares and materials for repairs on hand.

At the same conference, Rear Admiral Scott Brown said that the US Navy did not make sufficient investments in repair and maintenance capabilities when designing and acquiring the Virginia class SSN, resulting in the cannibalization of other boats to maintain operational numbers and delays waiting for parts and components that are often unavailable."
 
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