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Report: Shipbuilding in serious disarray

Navy shipbuilding is in “serious disarray” because top commanders have pursued an acquisition plan that has little to do with actual requirements or strategy, according to an early August report from a Washington think tank.

A “strategy-reality disconnect” is at the heart of what the authors describe as the Navy’s inability to control the costs of ships, and thus the problem with buying as many as needed, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a right-leaning Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, titled “Abandon Ships: The Costly Illusion of Unaffordable Transformation,” faults the Navy for not having a clear procurement plan.

Senior Navy leaders say their goals were outlined in the National Maritime Strategy, but that document isn’t a strategy at all, authors Hans Ulrich Kaeser and Anthony Cordesman said.

“It was rather a set of concepts that was not linked to any clearly defined force plan, modernization plan, program or budget,” they wrote. “A strategy that cannot be implemented or resourced is not a strategy, but rather a critical failure in leadership and management. It is nothing more than a statement of hopes and good intentions without credibility.”

Not only is the “strategy” not a strategy, Kaeser and Cordesman write, the Navy began work on it in two months after presenting a 313-ship plan to Congress in 2006, in what the authors call “a reversal of the logical order.” How, they ask, could the Navy decide on shipbuilding plans if it didn’t yet have a long-term strategy?

The “strategy-reality disconnect” continued from there, they write, when Navy planners issued optimistic forecasts for the number of ships per year they said the service could afford to reach the goal of 313. This was despite independent projections from the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office that estimated the ships would cost much more.

Congressional overseers made clear there was a credibility problem with the Navy — Cordesman and Kaeser cite the comment by Rep. Gene Taylor, D. Miss., chairman of the House Armed Services Seapower subcommittee, that the Navy’s plans were “pure fantasy.” But the sea service didn’t seem to get the message, the authors write, and continued to operate disconnected from reality.

“The costs already are high enough to make the U.S. Navy the greatest single peacetime threat to the U.S. Navy,” they write.

Cordesman told Navy Times on Friday that the Navy had suffered further credibility setbacks — both on Capitol Hill and within the service — after the late-July announcement that it would cancel its Zumwalt-class destroyers after two ships, partly because they apparently were not designed with any air defense capability. Cordesman said he was reminded of a time when he asked the Navy about potential problems with the A-12 attack jet program and was flatly told the problems didn’t exist. Six weeks later, he said, the Pentagon canceled the program outright.

The A-12 and the DDG-1000 are examples of a long-standing Navy inability to connect strategy with acquisitions, Cordesman said.

“I can remember, 20 years ago, being presented a new Navy strategy, and saying, well, what does it mean in terms of force levels, procurement plans and the budget, and getting a blank stare,” he said.

It’s not just a Navy problem; the CSIS report blames the highest tier of Pentagon leadership for acquisition problems throughout the military. None of the armed services have concrete, actionable policies in place to buy the gear they need, the authors write, but their commanders also are not held accountable for rising costs or unrealistic expectations.

A Navy spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.