Agency charged with long-term health of ships - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Agency charged with long-term health of ships

The Navy’s first office dedicated to keeping ships around as long as possible will stand up at East and West Coast waterfronts by early May and begin to provide details for how to get the most good out of the fleet.

The Surface Ship Life Cycle Management Activity, which will fall under the aegis of Naval Sea Systems Command, will determine the best ways for ships to reach their full service lives, said Rear Adm. James McManamon, deputy commander of surface warfare for NavSea. It’s not glamorous, but it’s vital, he said.

“Corrosion is not a very sexy subject,” McManamon said. “But it’s critical to me that I don’t [miss] a mission because the hull of my ship isn’t going to hold up.”

The management activity — which will have about 50 people at Naval Station Norfolk, Va., and a detachment of about 20 at Naval Base San Diego — won’t take the place of the Board of Inspection and Survey, McManamon said, or ship-class squadrons. It has a longer view.

“I’m not interested in whether the fire pump works — today — although somebody [is]; I want to know whether the piping that supports that fire pump works as well today as it does when the ship was built,” he said.

The surface force has struggled with keeping its ships in good shape and making sure crews are capable of assessing their own readiness. The commanding officers of a dock landing ship and mine countermeasures ship have been fired this year — in part, at least, because of the poor material condition of their ships.

McManamon said he thought the 27 other ships that did well on their InSurvs in the same period as those two ships showed that the surface fleet was in good shape, in terms of daily maintenance.

And unlike InSurv, the life-cycle management activity will take its cues from a pilot program in which NavSea contracted with inspectors from the American Bureau of Shipping to determine the material age of four warships.

McManamon said Wednesday that he had just received the engineering report on the first ship, the destroyer Ross, which was commissioned in 1997. Although Navy officials hadn’t yet reviewed the report, they hope it will explain whether the ship has 12 years’ worth of aging and corrosion. Every cruiser and destroyer must serve for its full life of 35 years if the Navy is to reach its goal of a 313-ship fleet, officials say.

The other three ships in the trial program are the dock landing ship Germantown — which already has started its inspection — the cruiser Mobile Bay and the frigate Taylor. The Navy expects all four reports, which together will cost about $2 million, by this summer.

As NavSea accumulates more detailed reports from ships of each class, engineers can begin to formulate new plans for what kind of preventive maintenance will enable those ships to serve as long as possible. McManamon acknowledged that would probably involve paying more upfront for repairs, but he said it would be cheaper to resolve problems early than to put them off.

For example, engineers first spotted corroded tanks aboard Wasp-class amphibious assault ships in 2004, but the Navy put off fixing them for four years. By the time each ship was repaired, the job cost three times as much, McManamon said. In another case, inspectors found structural and tank problems aboard the cruiser Vella Gulf that had been missed or had fixes deferred for years, requiring an additional $1.6 million in repairs.

Whidbey Island- and Harpers Ferry-class dock landing ships will be getting the most attention from the service life management activity because of their high operational tempo and the high demand from combatant commanders. Next in line will be the workhorse Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

McManamon said he wants the surface-ship activity to follow the example NavSea authorities already have set for aircraft carriers and submarines: the Carrier Planning Activity, and the Submarine Maintenance, Engineering, Planning and Procurement Activity.