Page 10: of Marine News Magazine (June 2022)

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By the

Numbers

Shayne Hensley / U.S. Navy

Improving US Naval

Shipyard Infrastructure

In 2017, the U.S. Government Accountability Of? ce (GAO) reported that the poor condition of the U.S. Navy’s ship- yard infrastructure—including dry docks, facilities and capital equipment—was preventing the yards from fully meeting the service’s operational needs. The congressional watchdog found that inadequate facilities and equipment was leading to maintenance delays, which contributed in part to thousands of lost operational days—days when ships were unavail- able for operations—across the Navy’s submarine and aircraft carrier ? eets. Further, the shipyards would not be able to support almost a third of planned depot maintenance periods for the current ? eet of aircraft carriers and submarines over the next two decades, according to the GAO report.

In response, the Navy in recent years has taken action to improve its public shipyards. In 2018 it began a 20-year, $21 billion effort to modernize and optimize its shipyards, known as the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan (SIOP).

The Navy has also implemented several GAO recommendations, such as creating a program of? ce to manage the SIOP, instituting regular reporting internally to the Navy and externally to Congress and improving its performance metrics for tracking maintenance delays to better capture infrastructure issues, among others. It has also invested in shipyard infrastructure well above the minimum level set by Congress.

These are steps in the right direction, certainly. But has there been any progress? In another report published in May 2022, GAO found that the average condition of facilities at Navy shipyards has improved at three of the four shipyards from 2016 to 2020.

10 | MN June 2022