Overhaul 19d: Carrier Team One Reflections4

Introduction

In my last post, I described the world that gave birth to Carrier Team One (CT1) and its unforeseen success. Process improvement is hard when upstream problems are undiscussable. Let me take you on a journey (this is where you are supposed to shout, “Take me! Take me!”). These are the reflections of a person who was junior process action team lead and twice-Chairman (some people don’t learn). Here’s why maintenance woes are really design flaws, why CT1’s magic was unrepeatable, and why process mattered more than bureaucracy. Fasten your safety belt.

Maintenance Problems are a Symptom

A favorite activity in the military is claiming that some problem (like maintenance) is solely due to lack of money. This misses the more important point: it’s about design. For most U.S. warship designs, maintenance resources seem to be an afterthought if they are considered at all.

Shipyards, skilled people, parts, and software that works—none can be conjured up by Congress writing checks. They also don’t show up on YouTube videos. Torpedo explosions snapping the keels of rusty hulls under tightly scripted conditions will always get more views than shipyard workers generating showers of sparks (just as cool in my opinion, unless the sparks are hitting you!). Actual maintenance requires people with the right technical skills who have access to sufficient spare parts. This was just as true during WW2 when thousands of workers were building hundreds of warships.

Ship maintenance isn’t based on how they actually work—it’s based on PowerPoint briefings to senior leaders describing how they *might* work. No amount of maintenance process optimizing can change this. And it is fundamental.

Maintenance will *always* be under-funded when designers have maximum optimism and zero opportunity to learn from their own mistakes. It’s not their fault completely. Warship design and construction take too long. Thus DoD acquisition regulations require estimates for reliability and maintainability. They don’t require them to be *accurate*.

Capability is only theoretical if a ship’s equipment is unreliable. Today, the newest Navy ships have large maintenance backlogs. This is regularly documented by GAO reports, which don’t require much investigation (“independent analysis”—sure). The Navy leaders they interview *tell* them, “We have maintenance backlogs.” A voice recorder could get that right.

Over my ship maintenance career, I never saw new, highly sophisticated systems actually work when first fielded. Not one. It is an iron rule of acquisition that wildly optimistic assumptions about immature technology and poor design result in more time at the pier and higher lifecycle costs.

CT1 sought to improve work on ships that weren’t reliability disasters. SYs had been working on Nimitz-class carriers for over 20 years. CVN 68 was commissioned in 1975 and CT1 began its activities in 1997. Most of the significant new construction design deficiencies had been addressed if not completely resolved.

Ship depot maintenance problems are consequences of an undiscussable of Navy ship design: the Navy isn’t building reliable and maintainable warships (GAO-20-2, DOT&E). Short version for comic book fans: we keep designing Ferraris for cross-country camping trips (a deployment is a lot like camping).

Today’s warship backlogs aren’t surprising: the systems don’t work, the parts don’t exist, and maintenance skills can’t be conjured up like brooms in *The Sorcerer’s Apprentice*. Lots of brooms wouldn’t help anyway because Congress isn’t providing the big increases for maintenance that used to conceal this.

Maintenance backlogs are the result of work deferred from construction (which would have exceeded the budget) or extensive post-delivery testing of and changes to systems that don’t work as imagined. Both of these lead to significant technical, design, construction, and maintenance problems (GAO report writers call these “challenges”). See this ChatGPT-generated summary, but be careful, it could cause grown men to cry.

The complex reasons for unreliable ship system designs are embedded in acquisition and contracting policies created decades ago, national defense strategies, misaligned incentives, and politics. They are also beyond the scope of my blog.

Sources of CT1 Success

Carrier Team One (CT1) wasn’t born on a NAVSEA slide deck. It came to life in 1997 when two process-savvy leaders (one civilian, one in uniform) came to a radical conclusion: shipyard work could only be improved by the people actually doing it. NAVSEA HQ was too far away—and too allergic to reality—to matter.

The timing was a stroke of luck. By the late ’90s, most of the ugliest Nimitz-class design disasters had been corrected. Spare parts made of “unobtainium” were available in rotable pools or cannibalized from new ships still under construction (CVN 75-77). Shipyards still had capacity. The submarine class maintenance plan deficiencies hadn’t yet sucked all the oxygen (and resources) out of the room. The stars aligned.

CT1’s real magic wasn’t brooms conjured up in a workshop—it was people. Mid-level shipyard managers with key skills were given license to act like professionals, not bureaucratic cogs. They were told: “You own the process. Permission granted to make it better.” And their customers—the Type Commanders—listened, shelved the blame game, and actually paid them to improve! Whoa! How radical!

It worked. Not because of NAVSEA strategic plans that seem to spring forth like plastic toys from machines at highway rest stops. Not because of a charter. But because a strange cocktail of timing, talent, and listening created conditions that couldn’t be bottled and sold to other platform communities even though people tried really hard.

Process Before Structure

CT1 didn’t start with a governance structure, a glossy charter, or a five-pound binder of “Process Action Management Plans.” There was no Executive Steering Committee. No Knowledge Sharing Networks. No branded polo shirts (they would have been cool though). Just people identifying bottlenecks and eliminating stupid stuff.

Structure came later—after the initial wave of success. Leaders wanted to bottle lightning, so they built committees, frameworks, and acronyms. Did it matter? Not really. If anything, it proved that bureaucracy is the tax you pay on success.

The next crop of shipyard work leaders often didn’t understand process thinking at all. Deming warned about this: real process focus requires ditching traditional, experience-based habits. But shipyard culture defaults to “hit it with a hammer until it behaves.” Deep reflection? That’s for analysts and whiteboards, not people swinging hammers.

CT1 thrived before the org charts showed up. Once the charts arrived, the results didn’t get better.

Process Focus

Presidents are said to ask, “Where are the carriers?” when the world goes sideways. Nobody ever asked, “Why are the new weapons elevators so unreliable?” Carrier presence = sexy (unless your adversary lives in a cave and can’t see them). Elevator downtime only shows up on PowerPoints taxpayers never see.

Before CT1, even with spare parts and manpower (most of the time), ships still finished maintenance late. Why? Because Navy maintenance is treated like a fast food experience. Policy makers seem to think you can pull into the yard, order a double overhaul with extra fries (don’t forget the chili cheese!), and roll out on time. Spoiler: it’s just as messy as a Sonic kitchen at 2 a.m. when the guy who dumps the grease trap calls in sick.

CT1’s secret wasn’t money or structure. It was process. We stopped playing “Pin the Blame on the Shipyard Donkey” — the Navy’s most beloved parlor game. (The donkeys never enjoyed it.) Instead, people analyzed how the work was actually done, and leaders had the guts to take on the entrenched interests and over-engineered requirements that were killing productivity.

Rickover’s famous “point your finger at the person responsible” quote? People put it on brass plaques and treat it like scripture, but never bother to explain it. I always thought it was a call for clarity, not finger-pointing. And the truth is, finger-pointing never fixed a pump or pulled a cable.

CT1 thrived because process analysis worked better than shame. It was almost magical. Almost. The downside? Once you see how much money people are burning on bad processes, you can’t unsee it. Luke Skywalker was right: “[It] would be … more wealth than you can imagine.” Only in Navy maintenance that wealth is being set on fire.

No, you can’t fix a bad process just by shoveling more cash at it. Want proof? Try redesigning a warship copied from another Navy while bragging it’ll speed up delivery. Spoiler: it doesn’t. GAO calls that a “challenge” (GAO-24-106546). I call it “What the heck were you thinking?”

Conclusion-"And then … miracle occurred"

Here’s my bottom line: ship maintenance woes are really design flaws in disguise. CT1 worked because timing, people, and leaders lined up. That wasn’t a formula — it was a miracle.

The Navy can’t reproduce CT1 today to reduce maintenance backlogs. One reason is unreliable ship designs, but there are many causes upstream of that. Doing “more CT1” is like treating pneumonia with cough drops. You might feel better for five minutes, but the disease will still be winning.

Miracles are fun when they happen, but they don’t scale. And Navy miracles, unlike Sonic chili-cheese fries, aren’t on the menu every day.