Dangerous Waters
The U.S. Navy finds itself metaphorically navigating through dangerous and restricted waters, constrained by shoals and buffeted by the strong winds and currents of change. The first and fast approaching shoal is the accumulating Naval readiness crisis evident in last year’s “Strategic Readiness” and “Comprehensive” reviews. Furthermore, the compounding currents of unabating operational demand, fiscal imperatives, and organizational inertia serve to push the Navy ever-closer toward this dangerous shoal. The second, juxtaposing shoal is the rapid pace of technological change, forcing the Navy to accelerate technological adoption in order to regain lethal combat power while simultaneously defending against proliferating dual-use, asymmetric and intertwining electromagnetic, cyberspace, undersea, surface, and aviation technologies. Finally, the changing winds of resurgent great power competition is concurrently increasing demand for naval operations and challenging the assumptions that have influenced the course of naval investments over the past two decades. This portends a dawning era in which contested sea control will be an ever-present planning factor particularly within the operational reach of burgeoning regional powers.
While there was no definitive start, internal decision, or a decisive set of external pressures that caused the Navy to drift toward these dangerous waters, it continues to coast on this hazardous course. However, as a point of reference, around the turn of the millennium the Navy aggressively pursued “doing more with less” through appeals to “1000-ship” collaborative navies and transformational “Enterprise” activities which sought to maximize efficiencies without commensurate commitment toward effectiveness. The results are now painfully evident in retrospective readiness reviews. While training and personnel readiness are clearly under strain, a more egregious nexus of readiness decline is prevalent in the Navy’s ability to conduct maintenance and modernization equal to the Nation’s demand for a powerful, deployed Naval force. If the Navy is to serve as a fully modernized, war-ready, and credible deterrent in the troubled regions of the world, it must revitalize its maintenance and modernization capabilities and capacities through prioritized resourcing of organizations, technology, and improved, agile processes.
A Position Fix
In his review of surface force readiness in February 2010, retired Vice Admiral Phillip Balisle reported a decrease in preventative maintenance, reductions in shore organizational capability and capacity to support maintenance, a growing trend in deferred maintenance, and reduced maintenance and modernization “availability” time periods for major work. More recently, the “Strategic Readiness Review” (SRR) underscores that this trend is not isolated to the past decade. It reports that while the navy has shrunk from 594 ships in 1987, to 279 today, it continues to operate “a 100-ship deployed force worldwide, which has accelerated the consumption of ships’ service lives” and increases the length, cost, and complexity of maintenance and modernization periods. This accelerated service life consumption translates into exponential increases in maintenance costs per ship as observed in a 2015 RAND report. Additionally, the SRR draws attention to the 300 F/A-18C/D aircraft under a repair backlog and a similar 177-month maintenance backlog across 15 nuclear-powered submarines. Also, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) indicated in September of 2017 that the Navy’s public shipyards are in desperate need of recapitalization to effectively modernize and maintain the Nation’s nuclear fleet. The “backlogged restoration and maintenance projects at the shipyards has grown by 41 percent over five years, to a Navy-estimated $4.86 billion, and will take at least 19 years (through fiscal year 2036) to clear.”
Meanwhile, Russia and China are working feverishly to become peers and possibly leaders in developing hypersonic, artificial intelligence, unmanned, and quantum systems. Moreover, global technological trends are pushing nations to explore military uses for proliferating, advanced sensors, virtualized computing, data analytics, and software defined radios which are sensing and manipulating the electromagnetic environment. The U.S. Navy is no slouch in this innovative arena as witnessed by the Office of Naval Research’s “Research and Development Framework” and its associated addendum, which highlights various pursuits toward directed energy, railgun, swarming, unmanned, and hypersonic systems among many others. In addition, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardsonadvocated for increased “high-velocity learning,” whereby more productive or effective methods are quickly and widely adopted within the Navy. Furthermore, he continues to call for advances in Naval innovation as illustrated in this year’s document The Future Navy, where he states, “The Navy must get to work now to both build more ships, and to think forward—innovate—as we go. To remain competitive, we must start today and we must improve faster.” However, this speed represents a direct and significant modernization challenge.
An aspect of the Navy’s readiness deficit is its challenge to rapidly experiment with and modernize its platforms. There is cause for concern in transitioning the previously noted R&D capabilities across the acquisition valley of death into fielded systems integrated onto naval platforms. Integration of these technologies promises a more dynamic, networked, effective, defensible, and lethal fighting force, but at increasing cost and stress to the Navy’s maintenance and modernization communities. When integrated onto naval platforms, many of the rapidly evolving technologies often require unrelenting updates and upgrades to simultaneously remain operational, keep obsolescence at bay, and pace adversary advances. In addition, many naval system-of-systems architectures increasingly are crossing various program lines of responsibility requiring numerous program offices to synchronize upgrades in order to deliver cross-domain capabilities, such as Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air, Real Time Spectrum Operations, and Navy Cyber Situational Awareness. Exasperatingly, there are examples in which program managers, to reduce process delays and cost, decided not to pursue network authorizations for their sensors, thus isolating the data to a local watchstanding position unable to share it across the force.
The accelerating and cyclical pace of this technological adoption confounds the Navy’s existing processes across system commands, type commanders and the greater naval maintenance and modernization communities. To install equipment or perform a major upgrade, depending on its complexity, it averages 36-months to maneuver through the navy modernization process and longer if cybersecurity authorizations are required. Congruently, there are growing concerns that fleet configuration uniformity and aspects of interoperability are being undermined. This is due to continuous adjustments in underlying technology at a pace asynchronous with opportunities afforded by the already overtaxed naval maintenance and modernization processes. The situation presents a radical challenge to a heavily deployed force and a navy modernization community with limited windows of availability for performing work on naval platforms.
Charting A New Course
The breadth and magnitude of this backlogged restoration of naval combat power combined with the need to build a larger fleet will not serve the nation in an era trending toward “unbalanced multi-polarity” and resurgent great power competition as Seth Cropsey and Bryan McGrath elucidate in their recent analysis titled “Maritime Strategy in a New Era of Great Power Competition.” Additionally, the underresourced maintenance and modernization communities burdened with sclerotic technology and byzantine processes are challenged to meet the CNO’s desire for innovative speed while mitigating unintended risks to platform, personnel, and mission through safeguarding proper platform configuration and interoperability. Therefore, navy-wide resources and innovative energies must be expended to foster a renaissance across naval maintenance and modernization and buy-down its decades of incurred capability and capacity deficit, so the Navy can sail with chutzpah on a new corpen toward a confident position of warfighting readiness.
Initially, the Navy must adequately resource existing maintenance and modernization organizations and associated processes to reduce bottlenecks and empower process improvement. Retired Captain Steven Coughlin superbly advocates for these needed resources by describing how critical these people and organizations are to the materiel health and resilience of the Navy in his article, “Weathering the Workload: Maintaining the U. S. Navy’s Surface Fleet.” This initial effort should also include resourcing critical adjacent processes, such as those for system and network cybersecurity certifications and authorizations which otherwise could delay or add significant cost to navy-wide modernization efforts.
Furthermore, shipyard facilities and equipment such as drydocks, cranes, and sheet metal rollers must be upgraded, and new technologies exemplified by 3D laser scanning, improved simulation and modeling, and advanced product lifecycle management should be commonly exploited to create more capable and effective maintenance and modernization institutions and workforces. While these capital, equipment, and technological investments may generate long-term cost savings, these savings should be reinvested within these organizations to provide the true capacity the current and future Navy requires.
Building on the previous recommendations for healthy and whole institutions, improved coordination and enhanced processes between system acquisition communities and the maintenance and modernization organizations could advance more rapid technology insertion, upgrades, and reduce the inherent tensions across their various mission sets. This is exemplified by the Acoustics-Rapid COTS Insertion (A-RCI) program, which is designed for planned periodic upgrades to the submarine sonar system. The Tactical Submarine Evolution Plan also “establishes the basis for quickly leveraging evolving improvements and revolutionary technologies, establishing the clearinghouse for inputs from the fleet, industry, and builders” according to Rear Admiral William Merz. Similarly, the Aegis combat system pilot program to “virtualize” its core system for more rapid testing and fielding may help to ameliorate traditional modernization workloads by streamlining technology insertion and associated processes. Collectively, these concepts form the basis for truly high velocity learning that must proliferate across Navy programs.
Correspondingly, the Navy should look to revise the “Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual” (JFMM) and the “Navy Modernization Process Management and Operational Manual” (NMP-MOM) with an eye toward process improvement and agility, work flow optimization, and instantiating a complementary data strategy to support data-driven decisions. Ideally, the Navy’s Digital Warfare Office would support this effort through a dedicated pilot program incorporating industry leaders in data strategy development, data warehousing, analytics, and algorithm development to revamp the antiquated Navy Data Environment (NDE) and the Naval Maintenance Database (NMD). It could better integrate agile processes with robust risk mitigation across Navy maintenance and modernization stakeholders, providing data-driven decision aids and empowering the Navy to implement various RAND and GAO recommendations previously unattainable.
Improved understanding of causal factors across maintenance trend lines, near and long-term risks of deferring specific maintenance or modernization activities, cumulative effects of deferrals, and interdependencies of maintenance and modernization activities could enable enhanced prioritization or optimization schemes, mitigation strategies, and activity-to-availability assignments. Also, modernization or capability upgrades predominantly consisting of software changes without fluctuations to installed size, weight, power, cooling, or electromagnetic radiation could receive process fast-tracking provided that accurate configuration and interoperability data is consistently captured. This could accelerate various command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) modernization activities. In addition, installation and authorization processes and decisions could be modified to better support temporary platform-based experimentation efforts, thus reducing workloads and costs across numerous stakeholders.
Some of these systemic recommendations are designed to make use of the strategic value of data which could facilitate more nuanced and conservative contracting strategies by facilitating rapid work requirement finalization to support contract writing without expanding maintenance and modernization planning time-horizons. This could better balance competing needs, such as the fleet’s desire to wait if possible before locking down work requirements allowing for greater upgrade opportunities, whereas contracting entities desire to stabilize a lower cost contract earlier. For example, the Navy’s new Multiple Award Contract, Multi Order (MAC-MO) approach could benefit from improved data strategies, process flow, and analytic environments.
Ultimately, as the Navy is confronted with this allegorical, restricted-maneuvering environment, hemmed in by dangers waters, it is her duty to chart a new course by championing a strategy to modernize the institutions and processes of naval modernization and maintenance. She must recapitalize and reinvigorate organizational wholeness, harmonize system acquisition and naval platform life cycle processes, and take advantage of technology and the power of data to transform the state of naval materiel readiness. By finding this optimal course, she will clear these navigational hazards and build a more resilient and lethal fleet to deter our nation’s adversaries and, if necessary, win our nation’s sea battles.
