Read on Twitter
. @MalShelbourne and @maeday22 lay out the tricky calculus facing @NAVSEA in its plan renovating pubic shipyards. https://twitter.com/USNINews/status/1361330839963926529
In a nutshell:
It's an old story, but in summary, again:
the @USNavy maintenance infrastructure is digging out of 15+ years of deferred maintenance which is not going fast.
the @USNavy maintenance infrastructure is digging out of 15+ years of deferred maintenance which is not going fast.
Every available naval drydock to fix ships is at near capacity on both coasts and Hawaii. And shipyards have been called in to pick up the slack with mixed results. https://news.usni.org/2020/08/26/lack-of-u-s-warship-repair-capacity-worrying-navy
That work is going on in tandem with an almost two-year-long spike in demand for naval forces around the world.
Sorry broken thread: https://twitter.com/samlagrone/status/1361336169112469512
No to mention the abbreviated repair avail for Truman after its own double pump saga and lack of capacity at Norfolk Naval shipyard stretching the repair of relatively young carrier Bush to two years. https://news.usni.org/2020/07/08/carrier-truman-enters-shipyard-for-short-repair-period-after-back-to-back-deployments
Much of this hinges around the Carrier Strike Group as the in-demand unit and *arguably* a latent institutional resistance to explore other formations to fulfill the Navy's presence mission.
That CSG supply/demand mismatch and how the Navy's actually done a pretty good job meeting the needs of the COCOM deployment by deployment has over 20 years created this hole that's been tried to be patched by all manner of institutional fixes which aren't worth going into here.
This story is important because of the push-pull of fixing-the-yard-now-to-repair-more-ships-in-the-future *vs.* fix-the-yard-in-the-future-to-clear-more-ships-now is a dynamic that's presented in every aspect of this problem.
Countless little balancing acts like this are interlinked across the creating the current holistic nightmare of Navy readiness that usually gets boiled down to simplistic focus on a single part of the problem. Like, "OFRP doesn't work."
OFRP would probably work if it was funded. The Fleet Response plan probably would have worked if it was funded and supported. But they were both structured to run on credit and the APR is a bitch.
. @maeday22 put it all out here last year but the fundamentals remain true.
https://news.usni.org/2020/11/12/no-margin-left-overworked-carrier-force-struggles-to-maintain-deployments-after-decades-of-overuse
https://news.usni.org/2020/11/12/no-margin-left-overworked-carrier-force-struggles-to-maintain-deployments-after-decades-of-overuse
