Overhaul 11: Navy Ship Maintenance Realities Pt2
Introduction
In my last post, I described some of the things people think they know about ship lifecycle management that just aren’t so. The first step to clearer thinking about Navy ship maintenance is “ditch the nonsense.” The next step is “know where the leverage is.”
This is a continuation of the last post on Navy ship maintenance realities. In this post, I’ll review the fundamentals of Navy ship maintenance, discuss the role of Class Maintenance Plans (CMPs), cover the most common reasons for re-evaluating CMPs, and provide some conclusions about Naval ship life cycle management: acquisition, logistic data, modernization, and maintenance. The post is longer than I would like, but I want to wrap up this topic and move on to others.
The Fundamentals of Navy Ship Maintenance
The essence of ship depot maintenance is: knowing what work to do (a combination of the CMP and Condition-Based Maintenance), planning for that work (getting material, writing repair procedures, and training people-all require up-to-date logistics data), facilities, processes and people capable of doing the work, and finally testing what was done. My shorthand is: knowing, planning, doing, and testing.
Ship’s force is intimately involved with all facets of depot maintenance, except facilities, as I have noted previously. With regard to facilities, the role of ship’s force is to understand the overhaul environment and adapt to it. Not only is resistance futile, it can be disastrous.
Before discussing CMPs, I want to emphasize the importance of taking a condition-based approach to planning overhaul work. Condition-based maintenance means repairing items based on observed conditions and data. When water is leaking from a crack in a pipe or a pump is vibrating noticeably, the repair isn’t a difficult decision. More sophisticated diagnostic procedures that can detect the onset of failures like machinery vibration, heat exchanger tube inspections, and other indications of incipient or hard to observe failures like corrosion of gas turbine intakes and uptakes are best done (sometimes can only be done) by highly-skilled maintenance professionals and engineers. If your lifecycle management processes don’t leverage this kind of expertise, the knowing and planning for depot maintenance will be severely impacted.
Class Maintenance Plans Must be Engineered
All ships have Class Maintenance Plans (CMPs) that describe the schedule of maintenance tasks with periodicities based on engineering analyses that include the type of availability where the maintenance should be accomplished. This is not a gift to the maintenance community from the acquisition community. Having a CMP is required by acquisition regulations and CNO instructions.
An engineered CMP serves two purposes. First, it is the basis for depot maintenance Availability Work Packages. Second, it is the primary means to defend maintenance budgets when people want to raid reduce them for “savings.”
Each maintenance action in an engineered CMP has two primary characteristics. The first is a technical rationale supported by data for the action. A maintenance action might be a repair, replacement, or inspection followed by repairs. Open and inspect maintenance actions during depot maintenance periods are risky, but sometimes there is no other option. You can’t take a ship apart for work discovery while it’s operational. It irritates the operators.
The second characteristic of a maintenance action is the periodicity. For the first ship of a class or new systems, maintenance action periodicities are based on the original equipment manufacturer recommendations or just inspections because there is no performance data. There is room for mischief here. New ship designs always underestimate lifecycle management costs. While I can say no more (this is another “undiscussable” of the acquisition process), the GAO highlighted this in its report Navy Shipbuilding: Increasing Focus on Sustainment Early in the Acquisition Process Could Save Billions (GAO-20-2, Mar 2020).
The technical basis and periodicity of CMP items mean nothing unless they current. CMPs get updated in two major ways. The first way to update a CMP is with technically verifiable performance and repair experience. The second way to update a CMP is badly. I will cover each in turn.
Good CMP updates are based on operational performance, shipyard repair records, and improved repair procedures. For example, improvements in coatings and tank surface preparation allowed aircraft carriers to extend the time between tank repairs and repainting. The CMP still included regular inspections of those tanks to verify that the coatings were performing as predicted.
Improved repair procedures or ship modernization replacing less reliable systems and materials can also reduce maintenance. Every change to a CMP must be documented with shipyard cost returns or inspection reports. This is one of the most important functions of ship planning activities. They have to be funded to do this, however. No funding equals out of date technical bases for the CMP.
CMPs are updated badly when a Navy organization responsible for lifecycle management responds poorly to prompts from higher authority. The prompt usually takes the form “those ships cost too much to maintain.” This is my shorthand for much more complicated back and forth negotiations, but the details don’t matter. The identity of those organizations doesn’t matter either, only that those negotiations trigger a review of the CMP to find “savings.”
Sometimes it is true that the Navy spends more on ship maintenance than it should. Repairs or equipment replacement can be done before they technically would be due. The most legitimate reason for doing maintenance “in advance of need” is if you have the money (rare, but could happen), it is nearly due, and you want some insurance that it won’t fail on the ship’s next deployment. It is also true that the Navy was doing far too much planned maintenance in the 1970s and 80s on systems that were working just fine. Most of that unnecessary “checking” has since been removed through Maintenance Effectiveness Reviews, but there is always a risk of unnecessary maintenance “sneaking back in” to the CMP because the Navy technical community is an inherently conservative group. Periodic reviews make sense, but some level of “over maintenance” is a good thing when you plan to send warships into harm’s way or they occasionally bump into sea mounts. It just isn’t cheap.
Sometimes the periodicities between maintenance get extended because there have to be savings. The simplest way to say this is that the maintenance costs of the class of ships exceeds what one part of the Navy wants to budget for it. They have other priorities. Whether maintenance is “affordable” is a value judgment and is always a tradeoff between the big categories the Navy spends money on: lifecycle management, new ship construction, personnel, weapons systems, modernization, operations, and research and development. While reductions to any of these are painful, lifecycle management looks like an easy target.
Maintenance savings in a CMP come in four major categories with varying degrees of risk of future problems:
reducing the number of man-days budgeted for the work (only advisable if shipyard return costs validate it, otherwise it is just a club for beating depot maintenance organizations),
deferring work you know you have to do out of one maintenance period and putting it in to a later one,
scheduling the maintenance less frequently (without data, this is just hope), and
not doing the maintenance (ever).
The CMP gets purged of maintenance and the ship class becomes less costly to maintain. Viola! Producing mandatory CMP savings without a valid technical rationale always has implications for operations and maintenance schedules. Poor decisions about maintenance deferral get corrected when the maintenance gets “put back in” as work pops back up in avails (“rust never sleeps”) or the ships have to be decommissioned due to excessive maintenance backlogs. Deferred work from the CMP can be the reason that an availability scheduled for 6 months lasts two years.
The Value of a Credible Class Maintenance Plan
An example of using an up to date, engineered CMP to defend maintenance budgets occurred when I was at the type commander staff. All three ship type commanders were told to show what would happen if their maintenance budgets were reduced by 2.5%, 5%, and 10% annually. At first glance, these appear like trivial reductions. With the aid of expert analysis by our planning activity, we argued that those reductions would render the ships under our cognizance undeployable within five years. The organization that originated the project scoffed expressed incredulity at this answer until I showed them the engineering analysis and technical data underlying the conclusions. They moved on to other projects.
Conclusions
This is my proposal for what should be considered the “realities” of Naval ship acquisition, modernization, and maintenance. This is where the leverage is for managing ship material readiness.
Naval ships and their systems and components are designed for maximum performance advantage in combat. This is usually accomplished through technological innovation and materials chosen for high performance.
High performance, technically innovative systems are expensive to repair. Ship and systems designers prioritize performance over maintenance (sometimes over certification processes, but that is a longer story). They also make more money that way. The GAO only scratched the surface of this issue in GAO-20-2 and the accompanying podcast (Mar 2020).
SY capacity changes slowly and its growth is subject to significant constraints.
Processes that are critical to overhaul have limitations, anything that impacts SY processes risks delays and raises costs.
New construction lifecycle management assumptions should only cause surprises once.
New work in depot maintenance is not a cause of overhaul delay. It is a symptom of deeper issues associated with lifecycle management and THAT’s what causes new work. Actions like deferring work from the CMP badly and deficient condition-based maintenance practices lead to problems that show up as new work. If you don’t look hard for material problems, they will find you. Genuine surprises during depot maintenance should only happen once.
If you aren’t successful getting the money that your engineered CMP demonstrates is necessary, you only have a few options:
Reduce force structure until maintenance needed matches budget or until you can produce ships that are cheaper to maintain. Smaller, less capable ships are probably the only way to do this. I know this is heresy and an undiscussable, which might be why the Congressional Budget Office writes the same things about the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan every year.
Reduce modernization, but this is unlikely to have a big enough impact.
Reduce lifecycle costs for future ships. Crew size is the probably the only number that matters because you can’t tell Congress “we’re making our ships less capable so we can afford to maintain them.”
Reduce logistics support. Besides being a bad idea because it results in lower quality, out of date selected record drawings and technical manuals. It severely impacts the planning and doing parts of maintenance and it doesn’t save much money. It’s been done, however.
Continue deferring ship maintenance (manage the material decline) with the hope that you will get more money someday. While a good friend of mine was fond of saying, “Hope is not an acquisition strategy,” this is probably a valid approach in the near term given the time and expense of procuring new ships.
Notice that I didn’t list “find cheaper ways to do depot maintenance” so you can buy more ships. That belongs in the rubbish bin.
While I have a few more posts remaining on the topic of ship depot maintenance, I’m going to change things a bit in my next post(s). It will probably become a series like they always do. The theme will be, “Yes, Virginia, it does make sense to price ships by displacement.” Stay tuned.
