Page 16: of Marine News Magazine (August 2023)

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Column

Washington Watch

NSMV: The Model of Future of Government Shipbuilding

By Jeff R. Vogel, Member, Cozen O’Connor

At the time of publication,

Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center to make the the ? rst National Security Multi-Mission Vessel (NSMV), business case for the recapitalization of the state maritime the Empire State VII, is steadily advancing towards its ? - academy training ? eet. The results of the study indicated nal delivery to the Maritime Administration (MARAD) that if the government failed to take action by 2025, three and SUNY Maritime College. Let’s be clear—this is a huge of the existing training vessels would be inoperable. Volpe’s win, not only for MARAD, its vessel construction manager Principal Technical Advisor for Transportation Logistics and

TOTE Services, the shipbuilder Philly Shipyard, and SUNY Security summarized the critical importance of ? nding a so-

Maritime, but for the future of government shipbuilding. lution, stating, “Without the state maritime academy train-

To put this milestone in its appropriate context, it is worth ing ships, there would be a long-term negative impact on reviewing how we got here. The NSMV program has a long national security, reducing the number of credentialed mari- history, transcending Presidential administrations and Con- ners available to operate U.S. vessels during war, national gressional leaders. In 2015, MARAD engaged with the U.S. emergencies, and for domestic and international commerce.”

That same year, MARAD began work with Herbert En- gineering to develop a design for what would eventually become the NSMV. The demands on the design would be signi? cant. In addition to have to physically ? t in the berths available at the state maritime academies, and serve as a state-of-the-art training platform for up to 600 cadets at sea, the vessel design would also have to accommodate use as a humanitarian aid and disaster relief (HA/DR) platform.

State maritime academy vessels being used to support HA/

DR missions was, of course, not a new concept. For exam- ple, in 2012, the TS Kennedy from the Massachusetts Mar- itime Academy and the TS Empire State VI from SUNY

Maritime College were used to house disaster relief workers during the Hurricane Sandy clean-up effort. The difference, of course, is that the NSMV was designed to speci? cally support HA/DR operations, incorporating a roll-on/roll-off side ramp, container space, onboard cargo handling equip- ment, a helipad and berthing for up to a 1,000 people.

The result was a mature design, which together with the business case from Volpe, allowed MARAD to receive

Congressional funding to begin the NSMV program in earnest. However, Congress saw the value of partnering with private industry to ef? ciently construct these next

Philly Shipyard 16 | MN August 2023