A week prior to the USS John S. McCain’s (DDG 56) collision earlier this month, the US Navy published an article that unintentionally raises issues that need to be part of an honest discussion: are we rewarding behaviors that fixes a short term problem, but creates an environment that greatly increases risk, degrades readiness, and negatively impacts retention of experience personnel?
The article in question was published online on August 14th, 2017 titled, John S. McCain Maintains Condition Readiness Underway.
Here’s the meaty bits that should give one pause;
Since getting underway, Big Bad John has closed over 350 maintenance and repair jobs with at least 100 of those jobs being classified as “depot-level” jobs. Depot-level jobs are maintenance jobs that are considered beyond the capability of ship’s forces, and, are typically conducted in the ship-yard or by contractors. The repairs included 403 discrepancies discovered during the MCI.
“In the past month, from the beginning of June to the first of July, we have completed over 204 jobs,” said Chief Warrant Officer Joshua Patat, a maintenance material officer aboard McCain. “Over 40 percent of the jobs were depot-level jobs and yet our guys completed them. These jobs are normally done in port, yet, we are finding ways to overcome this and be self-sufficient.”
McCain’s Repair Division conducts on average 180 hours of preventative maintenance a week on all their equipment.
“This is the fifth ship I’ve been on,” said Chief (Select) Gas Turbine Systems Technician (Mechanical) Matthew Squazza. “It is the most ship-shape ship I’ve been on and it’s because of the crew onboard always pushing to get the job done. Coming to a ship this old and in this good of a condition speaks for itself.”
Questions:
– 40% of the maintenance performed by ship’s company was actually depot level work. Is the ship manned to not only perform required ship-level maintenance, but 66% more maintenance that should be performed at a depot-level facility?
– Why were these depot-level repairs not done at the appropriate facility? Is this normal for 7th Fleet? If so, why? If not, why was the MCCAIN doing this?
– What unit-level training, PMS, watch, or rest requirements were the crewmembers not able to do because they were doing this depot-level maintenance?
There is also the last paragraph quoted above. MCCAIN was commissioned in 1994. She has 23 years of commissioned service. If she is 23 and our Sailors consider her an “old ship” but one in good condition compared to others of similar age – what does that tell you about this assumption?
The Navy historically retires destroyers and cruisers at about 30 years. Now it plans to keep its older Arleigh Burkes in service 35 years and the newer ones for 40.
“The longest I can find we have kept a warship in service since World War II [was] the nuclear cruiser Long Beach,” said naval historian Norman Polmar. “She was in service 37.9 years.” Allied nations have kept former US Navy vessels going for even longer, but they don’t sail them around the world the way we do, he said: “Our ships wear out become we run them so hard.”
“We don’t have a lot of recent experience operating destroyers into their thirties,” agreed Congressional Research Service analyst Ronald O’Rourke. “We may be in for some surprises if we do keep ships that long.”
We need a serious, blunt, and open ended discussion about what we are doing about manning our ships properly so we don’t do to the BURKEs what we did to the SPRUANCEs. We need to look even closer at what we need to do with shore depot-level maintenance.
If we want to fight a war in WESTPAC, as we discussed in the second half of Sunday’s Midrats, we need to bring back Destroyer Tenders sooner more than later as well.
What we don’t need to do is shrug our shoulders and carry on as before – and hope we don’t have the same problems.
If we find the money to build our fleet to 355, it will be a false victory if we don’t man that fleet properly and have the depot level repair facilities to go with them. If we do that, we’ll just have a bunch of tired Sailors driving rusting hulks in to merchant ships to the disgust of our friends and to the comfort of our enemies.