WASHINGTON -- It's almost a given that when a new administration takes over in Washington, international opponents find ways to test the will of the new leadership. Russia and China, Iran and North Korea, ISIS and Al Qaeda can all be expected to take actions that will put pressure on the new president to show what he or she is made of. And when the issues arise next year, a new set of leaders are likely to ask the proverbial question, "Where are the carriers?"
The answer, at least in the first weeks of the next administration, may not be what people want to hear.
The carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower is patrolling the waters of the Persian Gulf this fall as the single most powerful asset of US Central Command. After months of launching strikes against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq, the ship is scheduled to be relieved in January by the carrier George H. W. Bush. Ike will then head home to Norfolk and complete a seven-month deployment. Keeping the deployment to that length is a key goal of the Navy, which is trying to avoid cruises turning into eight-nine-ten-month affairs that wear out people and equipment.
But there's a problem. The Bush is running behind schedule, having come out of a maintenance period at Norfolk Naval Shipyard that initially was to have been completed in six months, but instead lasted 13. The ship, her air wing and the rest of her strike group should have had most of this year to train up in proper fashion and deploy in December in time to relieve the Eisenhower. But that original ten-month training period dropped to eight months when the Navy first announced the overhaul would go long, then shrank to four months by the time the Bush returned to the fleet in late July.
Even then, the Navy organization in charge of making sure the Bush strike group is fully trained appears to have been unprepared to quickly implement a plan to deal with the delay, and several more weeks went by while Norfolk-based US Fleet Forces Command (USFFC) seemingly struggled to determine the way ahead and make a choice between compressing the training period to deploy on time or delaying the deployment and train up more fully.
A delay in deploying could mean the Eisenhower's cruise will need to be extended, or Ike could come home on time and leave a carrier gap in the CENTCOM and European Command region – an unattractive prospect when chances are high the Russians, ISIS, Al Qaeda or Iran could provoke some sort of incident in those theaters.
The Bush deployment shouldn't necessarily affect the situation in the Pacific, where Pacific Fleet carriers have recently shifted from sharing CENTCOM duties with Atlantic-based strike groups to cruising the western Pacific in and around the South China Sea.
But the root cause of the Bush's overly-long overhaul – naval shipyards suffering from budget cuts and workforce reductions, unable to keep up with the demand from the fleet – certainly is affecting both fleets. On Oct. 5, the carrier Nimitz emerged from Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, to carry out sea trials after a 20-month overhaul – four months longer than planned. It is not clear, however, if that delay will affect future West Coast carrier deployments, as at least one carrier is ahead of Nimitz in the deployment rotation.
And the problems are not new. In October 2014 Fleet Forces Command announced that the Eisenhower's 2013-2015 overhaul at Norfolk would run six months long, and the carrier Harry S. Truman had to step in and cover a deployment that Ike was unable to make. Eisenhower finally deployed on June 1, 2016.
Problems with the Navy's four shipyards – Norfolk; Puget Sound; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; and Portsmouth, Maine – have been cited by Navy officials for several years. Admirals decry budget cuts that have imposed workforce reductions in all the yards, along with inconsistent funding from years of delayed budgets. The fleet's ships are caught in a vicious cycle – operational tempo has been high, meaning ships routinely miss out on scheduled overhauls, called "availabilities" by the Navy. Ships that do come into the yard wind up needing more work than planners scheduled them for, and coupled with reduced work forces, the overhauls run long, often producing delays in work on other ships. Training regimes are adversely affected, and the operational availability of a ship could be delayed for months or more.
Naval Sea Systems Command, the entity that oversees the Navy's shipyards, does not shy from admitting the problem.
"The primary reasons the [Bush's availability] took longer than planned is that the shipyard's workload exceeded its capacity and shipyard performance challenges," said Rory O'Connor, a spokesman for NAVSEA.
"The workload assigned to the four naval shipyards has increased over the last several years," O'Connor explained. "While the Navy increased the size of the workforce, the workload increased faster than our capacity. Norfolk Naval Shipyard allocated resources to assigned availabilities based on priority, and the resulting manning shortfalls delayed the schedule."
A similar situation affected the Nimitz in Puget Sound.
"Nimitz was also adversely affected by capacity issues," O'Connor said, adding that, "some of the extension of this availability was also due to the late identification of repair work that was not in the original schedule."
O'Connor noted that the four shipyards are rebuilding their work forces. Since 2013, he said, "the Navy has hired approximately 14,000 new shipyard workers" – a number that reflects plus-ups at all four yards as well as new hires replacing retired or laid-off workers.
The civilian work force at Norfolk and Puget Sound -- each more than twice as large as the two smaller yards -- has grown since September 2013. Norfolk has added 1,425 employees for a total of 10,542, while Puget Sound has grown by 2,549, up to 13,425 employees.
But the problem isn't solved quickly by simply hiring workers. "Employees need to be trained," O'Connor said, "and it takes time to gain experience."
To cope, the yards have begun farming out some nuclear submarine overhauls to commercial yards, a change in the practice of recent years where all nuclear overhaul work was conducted in the naval yards. At least four submarine overhauls are or will be carried out in private yards, at General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut, and Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia – the only yards in the US that build nuclear submarines.
Delays in overhauls aren't just attributed to the difficulty of performing the work when a ship is in the yard – there are also issues with planning the availabilities. In general, a shipyard might have a year to plan an overhaul such as the Bush's. Work needs to be identified, the length and scope of a job determined, sequencing laid out, parts and materials ordered in advance, workers scheduled to be available. Personnel reductions have affected planning departments as well as the skilled labor force.
Norfolk Naval Shipyard led the planning work for the Bush's 2015-2016 overhaul. Some sources assert there were problems carrying out the work, with some planning being transferred to HII – which in turn is reported by some to have had issues, also said due to being brought in at a later date.
HII, along with General Dynamics NASSCO, had significant pieces of the Bush work, but under "discrete" contracts issued for particular jobs.
But O'Connor said Norfolk Shipyard had the lead all the way.
Norfolk Shipyard "began planning the planned availability for the Bush in the summer of 2014 and maintained control of the planning duties for the duration of the availability," O'Connor said. "HII and other private companies were brought in to help augment the Norfolk workforce by executing specific, discrete work."
HII, working under a $23.8 million contract issued June 22, 2015, was "to execute nuclear propulsion and complex modernization work aboard the Bush but was not tasked with planning the entire availability," O'Connor said.
GD NASSCO received two contracts totaling $42.4 million to work on the Bush.
But while the shipyards struggled to complete work on the carrier and the overhaul stretched well into 2016, it is not clear Fleet Forces Command was preparing plans to handle the compressed training period the strike group would need.
USFFC actually has a plan to make it easier for carrier forces to surge should the need arise. The Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP) coordinates all the commands and entities needed to prepare a strike group to deploy. OFRP, a more refined version of the Fleet Response Plan, is still relatively new and untried, but has been cited by USFFC commanders as a key component to execute the command's responsibility to man, train and equip the Atlantic Fleet's carrier groups.
The plan was cited prominently in USFFC's Oct. 6, 2014, statement discussing the Truman-Eisenhower deployment swap.
But USFFC has been silent on the Bush's situation since the carrier left Norfolk Shipyard on July 23, not even taking the opportunity to cite the much-touted OFRP as a solution. Sources in the Navy said major meetings were held by Fleet Forces Command in late August to determine the way ahead for the Bush strike group, but no announcements have been made as to what decisions were reached.
USFFC, NAVSEA and Norfolk Naval Shipyard should have been in regular communication throughout the Bush's overhaul period, sources said, and it is clear the deployment schedule was threatened months in advance of the overhaul's completion. Suggestions that USFFC's awareness of the Bush's lengthening overhaul was insufficient to deal with the situation in a timely manner have not been denied, but officials declined numerous requests to discuss the situation.
The Bush has been at sea this fall undergoing training, and returned to Norfolk on Oct. 3 after about two weeks underway. According to a Navy source, the ship is still dealing with defects not completed during the overhaul. A major multi-week exercise, the Composite Training Unit Exercise, required to certify the readiness of the crews and equipment of the carrier, the air wing and the strike group's surface combatants, still needs to be completed before the deployment can begin.
For the record, Navy officials will not comment on whether or not the carrier will deploy in time to relieve the Eisenhower without a gap in carrier coverage. Unofficially, sources said the Bush will likely deploy early in 2017, but no decision has been made on extending the Eisenhower.
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