Overhaul 19c: Carrier Team One Reflections3

Introduction – “Brevity Is Not in My Toolkit”

My first two posts about Navy ship depot maintenance improvement focused on the background behind the inaugural Carrier Team One (CT1) meeting under the church in Bremerton in 1997. Unlike Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julias Caesar, I didn’t write this post to bury CT1. My purpose is to provide some context and personal reflections from my decade of experience working as a participant.

I’ve been told many times that brevity isn’t in my maintenance toolkit so it will be a series of posts.

In this post, I provide more background about the world in which CT1 was created, explain why senior leader demands to improve usually don’t work (“Get better, darn it!”), and describe the opportunity seized by the brains behind CT1. The posts will include many personal and outright insubordinate reflections (sometimes called “snark”). I hope that makes it as much fun to read as it was to write.

The Era of CT1 – “Before Mission Funding Chaos”

Team One formed at a time when government shipyards (SYs) were reasonably well-staffed (numbers and experience) for the carrier depot maintenance workload. “Reasonably well” is subjective, but it was before Navy leaders converted all public SYs to the clown show known as mission funding.

Mission funding means that the SY’s are resourced (people and parts) for a _maximum_ amount of work every year. Somebody forgot to tell the operators. Perhaps they know and don’t care, hard to tell. In theory, mission funding SYs limits waste. In practice, it just means you run out of people, time, and parts before you run out of ships to fix.

Mission funding works like this for SYs: invite one friend to your house for Thanksgiving. He brings everyone in his neighborhood then complains you ran out of food . Whoops!

In the 90’s, the fleet followed standard operational cycles: maintenance, training, operations, repeat. The Nimitz-class Incremental Maintenance Plan was based on work packages that had engineered, data-driven requirements supplemented by robust work discovery processes. Depot maintenance was divided into 6-month and 11-month flavors.

Even with stable manpower, predictable schedules, and well-designed (mostly) work packages, SY depot maintenance performance was predictably bad in the 1980’s and 90’s. Still, that was better than being unreliably awful like U.S. Navy warship construction (“I know you’re lying because your lips are moving!”).

In 1995, RDML Porter became NAVSEA 07, Deputy Commander for Naval Shipyard and SUPSHIP Management and Field Activity Support. Despite the long title, he was no more in charge of managing ship depot maintenance than anyone else. His staff wrote a strategic plan about the need to improve. The result? Crickets.

Calling for SY improvement without aligning budgeting, planning, funding, and execution was — and still is — pointless.

The lack of alignment in ship maintenance wasn’t shocking, although it should have been. First, “alignment” wasn’t a “thing” in the Navy until Vern Clark became CNO in 2001. Clark’s quest for aligning the Navy’s fiefdoms lost headway rapidly once civilians figured out what he was up to. They formed long lines outside his office to declare that what he wanted was forbidden by Congress. Go figure!

Second, there had never been alignment in ship maintenance — except when it came to blaming SYs. People align on that with zero effort.

Why Calls to Get Better Don’t Work or “Change Is Hard When the Real Problems Are Off‑Limits”

Most demands that organizations “get better” change nothing. It doesn’t matter whether it is insiders or outsiders doing the demanding.

In Leading Change*, John Kotter named eight classic reasons transformation fails. I would add a ninth: failing to radically restructure the organization, its processes, and how they are funded. That is, changing everything except the cafeteria menu. In the Navy, ‘radical restructuring’ is what happens when you change the PowerPoint template.

* Kotter, J. P. (1995). Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59-67.

You can’t impact the biggest constraints in the military unless you’re fighting a war. It helps if you’re losing — that’s when Kotter’s “sense of urgency” kicks in, if you’re not delusional. The problem is senior leaders often are.

The Navy spends a lot on ship maintenance. In 2025, Congress allocated $15.5B out of the Navy’s $257B total for ship depot maintenance. The “budget” isn’t a budget in the normal sense (“we have a plan, here’s what it costs, we’ll stick to it”). Navy budgets are more like New Year’s resolutions — impressive on paper, but the gym starts thinning out by mid‑February.

Every 3–4 years, someone calls for greater efficiency in ship repair. It never works, but keeps people busy going to meetings and working on PowerPoint slides. Demands like RDML Porter’s for huge savings via efficiency are, frankly, fantasy. But they sound bold. Saying you’ll make maintenance more efficient suggests you mean business, even if the business bears no relation to reality.

There IS an annual plan for Navy ship maintenance. The plan is only tenuously connected to reality. This is because all maintenance budgets are based on “notional” ship conditions, a fantasy I wrote about here. Real ships are always in worse condition than the notional. This means the annual plan is always wrong. Surprise!

Normally, giving false information to Congress has consequences (it’s sometimes called “lying”), but Navy leaders have an out. Responsibility is so diffuse that when Congress wants someone’s head, senior leaders can truthfully say, “We don’t know how that happened. Even if we did, that person changed jobs years ago. Now, about the extra funding we need…”

Still — $15.5B isn’t pocket change (unless you have BIG pockets). Yet it’s never enough. Why? Because no one can plan for fires, collisions, schedule changes, deferred maintenance (maintenance always costs more to do later), and structural flaws in DoD budgeting. Admirals who say they want to understand why ship overhaul costs always run high usually have to leave to attend their next meeting before Engineering Duty Officers get past slide two.

Saving money on ship maintenance is hard. You can’t change SY repair processes, redesign SY facilities, outsource to a country with looser rules. Those things happen on geological timescales.

The fastest way to reduce maintenance costs is not to do it. Full stop.

Shazam! as Gomer Pyle would say. The surface fleet are pros at this. Nobody cares about skipped maintenance — until an Admiral has to tell Congress ships are being decommissioned early. By the time Congress notices, it’s too late to do anything but ask for more money next year. The Admiral takes the verbal beating and has to promise to think about trying to possibly do better real soon.

Senior Navy leaders often act like they think depot work costs too much. Serving on a ship in overhaul doesn’t make you a maintenance expert — any more than staying at a certain hotel chain makes you a surgeon. Even if you could redirect savings toward new ships (you can’t — Congress forbids it), you wouldn’t get more than a couple tugboats.

I have no idea whether Navy senior leaders know this, but they don’t seem to be talking to anyone who does.

Navy leaders say they want maintenance to cost less. I’m sure they do, but they tend to have a strong negative reaction to being told “these processes require us to do stupid stuff.” Or they declare, “that’s not right.” Blaming another organization is easier and faster than looking around for flame-proof underwear because you have to tell the Admiral that his organization is partially responsible for expensive maintenance. The problem is that blaming doesn’t reduce ship depot maintenance costs.

So nothing changes. Because in Navy maintenance, all the important problems are off limits.

The Chance – “When Opportunity Met Prepared Minds”

In the fall of 1996, three carrier overhauls finished at nearly the same time. Two were very successful for reasons that everyone was too surprised to document. That was normal.

Before CT1, post overhaul reviews used to be called “Lessons Learned” meetings. The problem was that no one learned anything and everyone moved onto other things after the action items were written. People were too busy getting ready for the next overhaul to analyze processes for flaws. Finger pointing was faster and more satisfying.

As I noted in the two posts preceding this one, two senior leaders saw things differently. They were the right people in the right moment.

“In the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind” (Pasteur, 1954).

They had process-and-systems thinking in their bones and the authority to convene a process-focused meeting with the right players about external obstacles hurting shipyard performance. (SY internal issues? Too hard.)

They’d already spent over a year trying to drive change from NAVSEA HQ — which worked about as well as you’d think. Their knowledge and opportunity would have gone to waste if not for the invaluable assistance of the local SY commander (SYCO). He refused to let his department heads cancel the meeting. They tried hard and I can’t blame them. Seeking honest dialog with organizations outside the SY about overhaul problems wasn’t encouraged in those days. In Navy ship maintenance politics, that falls somewhere between heresy and volunteering to test a forklift ejection seat.

CT1 participants challenged idiocy and rewired Navy carrier depot maintenance processes for a decade — maybe longer. Hard to tell: Navy budget and maintenance idiocy move around quickly. NAVSEA 04, despite its title, doesn’t run the SYs or set much yard-impacting policy; it mostly defends their budgets. They weren’t active in CT1 improvements, but at least they didn’t get in the way. Sometimes, leadership is knowing when to keep your hands in your pockets and NOT send that email.

Conclusion – “A Miracle in Navy Maintenance”

CT1 came together in 1997 when shipyards had just enough resources, and the fleet cycled predictably. Yet overhauls were still late and over budget, with glaring misalignment between the many moving parts of Navy maintenance.

Admirals regularly tell people to do better. That’s what Admirals told them before they became Admirals themselves. And they mean it. But meaning it doesn’t change the fact you can’t quickly alter ship designs, facilities, or technical processes. Maintenance on expensive ships is — brace for impact — expensive.

When you try to reduce costs in the Navy, people line up to tell you why they can’t possibly change what they do. Besides, it’s the other guy’s fault.

Three overhauls in 1996 created an opening. Two leaders grabbed it, called a meeting, and actually listened to the people they invited to talk about problems. Then they gave them permission to fix what was fixable.

In Navy maintenance culture, that’s not just cool.

It’s practically a miracle.