Roughly a third of the Navy’s submarines remain unavailable to deploy, as they wait for repairs as the shipyards struggle to fix nuclear submarines with 100 year old equipment, Capt. Steve Mongold said at the Navy and Marine Corps Procurement Conference happening in Norfolk this week.
“In some cases, you can walk through some complexes and find machinery that dates back to the early 1900s that is still very much in use, but the maintenance and the overhead associated with that just compounds year after year,” he said.
The Navy has set a goal to have 80% of its fast attack submarines available by 2027. In June, Mongold was appointed to run a detachment to oversee submarine maintenance at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, as part of a pilot project to get submarines out of the yard faster. He said crews have become skilled at working around equipment breakdowns.
“Not only is that a distraction to the maintenance they're trying to perform. The tax that we pay on top of that is, as they're working the work arounds, they're not investing those same resources and working the planned work to get the jobs done on time,” Mongold said.
The Navy is leaning heavily into artificial intelligence tools and additive manufacturing to better predict the wear and tear on ships and build parts. On average, it takes 39 months for a supplier to build a new part, he said.
“We struggle with a lot of single and sole source vendors that are unable to meet the demands,” Mongold said.
The Marines are struggling with similar maintenance delays. The average maintenance time for the ships used to carry Marines is 750 days. Without enough available amphibious landing ships, the Marines cannot make all of their commitments, according to Brigadier General Christopher Haar.
“We face several gaps where the geographic combatant commanders are not allowed to have Marine Expeditionary units because the amphib ships are not there. Which limits our ability to forward deploy,” he said.
The Navy has been pumping billions of dollars into renovating its four public shipyards, including Norfolk, under the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program. More money is expected to be included in the latest defense bill. The Trump administration is seeking to revitalize shipbuilding in both defense and the commercial industry.
“The problems stem from mistakes made 30 to 40 years ago to cut off support for commercial shipbuilding in the 1980s,” said Hunter Stires, with the Navy League. He worked under Navy Secretary Carlos DelToro during the Biden administration.
The Navy shrank from nearly 600 ships at the end of the Cold War to less than 300 ships currently. Stires said rebuilding the industry will take more than a decade, and will require rebuilding the workforce.
“Certainly in the Tidewater area, you've got opportunities to expand recruitment and training,” he said. “This is one of the great centers of nuclear shipbuilding in the world. And so there are a lot of opportunities, both from a blue-collar as well as white-collar standpoint.”
Stires points to two pieces of federal legislation — The "Building Ships for America Act" and the “SHIPS Act" (Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security for America Act) — which aim to revitalize both military and commercial shipbuilding in the United States. The SHIPS Act would create a Maritime Security Trust Fund, which would fund improvements throughout the seagoing transportation system, he said.
