YOKOSUKA, Japan (Jan. 12, 2008) – The Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Shiloh (CG 67) receives an overhaul during a dry dock selective restricted availability. USS Shiloh is forward-deployed to Yokosuka, Japan and is part of Destroyer Squadron 15. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Bryan Reckard

USS Shiloh, a Navy Aegis cruiser, in drydock for maintenance.

WASHINGTON: The US would be hard-pressed to repair ships quickly enough during a war, a top admiral said today, underscoring similar concerns recently put forth by the Marine Corps in an internal document. 

“We don’t have enough capacity for peacetime” repairs, let alone a wartime surge, said Rear Adm. Eric Ver Hage, commander of the Navy’s Regional Maintenance Center, and Surface Ship Maintenance and Modernization office. “We’re not as effective or efficient — we have so much to be proud of — but we can’t get ships delivered on time with the predictability we need today.”

The sentiment reflects that expressed in an internal Marine Corps document obtained by Breaking Defense this spring, which acknowledged that “replacing ships lost in combat will be problematic,” since the US “industrial base has shrunk while peer adversaries have expanded their shipbuilding capacity. In an extended conflict, the United States will be on the losing end of a production race.”

The concern over the capacity of the handful of public and private US shipyards and the increasing time it takes them to do scheduled maintenance work has been top of the Navy’s leadership’s collective mind as it struggles to come up with a plan to add dozens of ships in the coming years, and keep them seaworthy. 

The Navy’s shipyards have been planning for this potential wartime scenario for several years, Rear Adm. Tom Anderson, program executive officer-ships said during the Navy League-sponsored webinar today. 

A team led by Navy acquisition chief James Geurts has been working to craft plans for how the nation’s shipyards and shipbuilders should react if American ships were damaged by the Chinese or Russian fleets.

Geurts established the group, dubbed the Wartime Acquisition Scalable Plan, to look at the US industrial base “beyond the traditional defense companies and its suppliers in order to meet the national defense strategy and the department of Navy’s readiness priorities to build and sustain a lethal naval force,” said Navy spokesmnan Capt. Danny Hernandez. “Part of their work has been discussing with U.S. companies how they could rapidly increase shipbuilding if needed.”

Anderson said the group has been examining “how prepared are we to go to the fight, and what would we do and how do we get better prepared,” to rapidly push ships out to sea and repair them when they came back.

The group is also looking into “what kind of authorities would we look for from Congress that we currently don’t have…It really is a more national look at what is the national capacity and how would we energize it.”

Right now, the four Navy shipyards are struggling so much that the service called up 1,600 Reservists earlier this year for year-long tours to work at the years helping to repair and refurbish aircraft carriers and submarines, 75 percent of which blow past their scheduled maintenance schedules. The Government Accountability Office recently reported on those delays, noting that carriers are averaging 113 days late, while subs are coming in 225 days late. Navy officials expect those timelines to get worse over the next two years.

Getting more capacity into the shipyards will be a heavy lift for the Navy, as defense budgets are expected to remains flat in the coming years.

“Some of the assumptions we made with regard to the budget, where we need 3 to 5 percent annual growth — we’re probably not going to see that,” Vic Mercado, assistant secretary of defense for strategy, plans and capabilities said earlier this month.

He mentioned taking “some risks in the near-term,” in order to invest in future technologies like hypersonics and artificial intelligence.

This all comes as the Navy and Defense Secretary Mark Esper insist the fleet must grow to at least 355 ships in coming years to keep pace with Chinese military modernization, a tough sell at a time when the Navy is having a difficult time maintaining the 300 ships it currently operates. 

One answer could be to bring in smaller commercial shipyards that haven’t traditionally worked with the Navy, while bringing a number of large shipbuilding companies into the fold to begin performing repair and overhaul work.

“There are shipyards that maybe don’t think they’re into overhaul mode but they probably need to [be],” John Rhatigan, chairman of the Marine Machinery Association, said during the Navy League event. He mentioned Bath Iron Works, which builds destroyers, and Austal, which builds a version of the Littoral Combat Ship, as prime candidates.

“I think they should be available or trying to make themselves available for overhaul work,” he said. “There’s capacity there that hasn’t been tapped yet.” 

Anderson said he recently took a trip to the Gulf Coast, where he visited a number of small, commercial shipyards he thinks could build the kinds of smaller manned and unmanned vessels the Navy and Pentagon leadership are looking at as part of the revamped 30-year shipbuilding plan, and much-delayed force structure assessment. 

Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist is expected to deliver those plans this fall.

“There’s a lot of capability along that Gulf Coast,” Anderson said, adding he thinks “they’d be very interested in building ships and craft for the US Navy.”