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Winter remains unsatisfied with LPD 17

Navy Secretary Donald Winter said Monday he “continues to be unsatisfied” with the performance of the amphibious transport dock San Antonio, which has been sidelined by emergency repairs since Oct. 31.

But after a speech in which he described the need for accountability and a “culture of quality” for Navy acquisitions and its private-sector vendors, Winter did not commit to new changes or penalties for problems with the San Antonio and its follow-on siblings.

“I continue to be unsatisfied with the performance there,” Winter said. “We are continuing to look at it. It’s a matter I’ll be spending some time on over the next few weeks. We’ll adopt an appropriate course of action ahead.”

Winter’s comments came after an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, in which he described his view of the role the private sector should play in working with the military. Although he didn’t mention the San Antonio class by name, he said the oversight of shipbuilding projects is “not quite as good as what I would like” and should include a focus on quality control from the earliest design, not just when ships are taking shape in the yard.

He singled out one of the world’s biggest shipyards, Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea, as an example of a yard that had impressed him with its end-to-end quality. It builds more than 70 ships per year for private-sector and government clients, including South Korea’s version of the Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyers.

On the other hand, American shipbuilding is in a state of “monopsony,” Winter said, in which a set of companies have only one buyer — the U.S. Navy — for their product. This makes it difficult for classical market forces to work, he said, and all the more critical that the Navy take extra care to manage its shipbuilding.

Winter did not single out defense giant Northrop Grumman, one of a handful of defense firms that builds U.S. warships, for the continuing problems with the San Antonio, although he has in the past. Last year, he exchanged letters with the company’s CEO, Ron Sugar, in which Winter complained about the condition of the San Antonio and Sugar responded by complaining about how many design changes the Navy had made, even after work on the ship had begun.

After a long, rocky road from its shipyard to the fleet, complete with delays, cost increases and many technical problems, the San Antonio made its first deployment in August. The Navy had been working to finish the incomplete ship since taking delivery in 2005, and in an Oct. 3 telephone news conference with reporters, its skipper, Cmdr. Kurt Kastner, said the gator had been performing well. But within a month, the San Antonio docked in Bahrain for emergency mid-deployment repairs to its lube oil system. Soon after, shipbuilding expert Tim Colton posted photographs online that showed the level of the ship’s degradation, including streams of leaking oil.

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