“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”― Benjamin Franklin
Once again, another datapoint of the danger any navy puts itself in when it neglects the unsexy but important.
It’s bad enough that Russia’s only aircraft carrier was damaged in a mishap involving the country’s largest floating repair dock — the only one big enough to maintain the flagship of the Russian Navy.
What’s worse is that the decades-old dock is now sitting on the bottom of Kola Bay, not far from the major Arctic Circle city of Murmansk.
But even that may not be the extent of the bad news.
The dock, even if it is raised to the surface, may be beyond repair, meaning Russia’s only aircraft carrier, several of its largest naval ships, and at least one ballistic-missile submarine may not be able to be serviced for months, if not years.
No redundancy and an excess reliance on hope and luck. If you are this thin at peace, what will a navy do when, as the British did at Saint-Nazaire in 1942, the enemy decides to attrit your maintenance ability?
Before we tut-tut too much at Russia, we should note our own capacity issues.
From 2017;
The four Navy-operated shipyards, including Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, are in “poor condition” and are “struggling to meet the Navy’s current needs,” according to a Government Accountability Office report published Tuesday.
From 2000 to 2016, “inadequate facilities and equipment led to maintenance delays that contributed in part to more than 1,300 lost operational days (days when ships were unavailable for operations) for aircraft carriers and 12,500 lost operational days for submarines,” the report states.
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In the same time frame, only 47 percent of aircraft carrier maintenance was completed on schedule and 24 percent of submarine maintenance was finished on time.
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The pile-up of repair and maintenance projects has grown by 41 percent at all four shipyards during the past five years. It will cost an estimated $4.86 billion and a projected 19 years to clear the backlog, the report states.
Yes, you read that right … 19 yrs. Hope no wars pop up.
PSNS alone has a need of $1.42 billion worth of delayed facilities restoration and modernization work.
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The four Navy shipyards operating today are all more than a century old. PSNS was established in 1901, The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, in 1800 and the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii in 1908. The oldest shipyard, the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, has been operating for 250 years since it was established in 1767.“They were originally established to build the sail and the steam-powered ships of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries,” a video released with the report states. “They were not designed to support the types of ships they maintain today, such as nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines.”
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…to deal with the drydock capacity issue, the Navy is trying out yet another contracting structure that would address this by incentivizing two-ship maintenance contracts to make best use of space at repair yards, bringing in new yards that have capacity in a drydock or on land to conduct ship maintenance and modernization work, and adding schedule flexibility that focuses on on-time delivery of the ship instead of meeting specific smaller milestones along the way.“We have so much work we have a capacity challenge on drydocks,” Downey said.
What are our plans in the event of unexpected losses, natural or man made, of our drydocks?
