President Joe Biden, in his 100-day address to Congress, unveiled a lavish $ 2 trillion infrastructure plan – with apparently something for everyone, from electric vehicles to elderly care. For our national defense, however, there is one area of the actual infrastructure that deserves attention now: the US Navy shipyards.
If we are to invest in America, the Navy’s four state-owned, government-operated shipyards are excellent candidates for infrastructure spending.
First, they are vital to national defense. These four yards maintain the Navy’s entire nuclear powered fleet, which includes aircraft carriers, attack submarines, and ballistic missile submarines.
Second, the shipyards desperately need the investment: all four shipyards are over 100 years old and their facilities were gradually built in very different epochs of shipbuilding. Today, these facilities are facing a workload beyond nuclear maintenance capacity, creating huge problems – and delays – for aircraft carriers and a growing submarine fleet.
The Navy already knows exactly how to get its shipyards into the 21st century. The Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan, SIOP, is a state-of-the-art plan for a complete overhaul of any naval shipyard using digital modeling. However, because the Navy does not have sufficient funds, the funds available that the Navy can use for this plan will not be sufficient as the fleet will need to grow to keep up with the Chinese and Russian fleets.
The Navy submitted the SIOP to Congress in 2018 and has been following it ever since. However, two problems remain, both of which should be regulated by law.
The first is that the SIOP is a 20-year plan that depends on just-in-time funding of a long line of projects through annual defense funds. For example, if the funding of a dry dock rebuilding project is delayed in a fiscal year, the ramifications would affect the overall plan as well as the overall maintenance plan for the core fleet.
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Other funding solutions could solve this problem and give the Navy guaranteed, consistent funding to complete the plan. A bipartisan proposal by Sens. Roger Wicker, Tim Kaine, Susan Collins, Angus King and Jeanne Shaheen (with accompanying legislation in the House of Representatives from Representatives Rob Wittman and Mike Gallagher) would use the Defense Production Act to fund the entire SIOP in one-time $ 21 billion payment to the Navy. Such a move would give the Navy access to the consistent funding it needs to ensure it can update its shipyards.
The second problem with the SIOP is its size. The plan addresses issues in the current shipyards in order to meet the needs of the current fleet, but not the future fleet. Most experts believe that the fleet needs to grow and change to meet the demands of the 21st century. The Navy’s most recent 30-year shipbuilding plan also includes novel new unmanned platforms whose changing service and maintenance requirements must also be taken into account.
In order to run the SIOP on the existing shipyards, there will be some level of maintenance disruption as new facilities will be built to replace obsolete ones and dry docks will be expanded. Therefore, the Navy will now need excess maintenance capacity for its submarines and aircraft carriers as well as for a larger fleet in the years to come.
Conclusion: The fleet needs more shipyard capacity in both commercial and public shipyards in order to ensure a ready-to-use fleet now and in the future. Efforts to remedy this deficiency should be supported, especially given that the decommissioning of the USS Bonhomme Richard after a severe fire last summer was due to the inability to carry out repairs on the ship without jeopardizing critical maintenance or newbuilding.
The Navy only had eight shipyards for a fleet of 359 ships (103 of them nuclear) in 1996, and the decision to close these facilities was intended to result in a post-Cold War peace dividend. Now the US geopolitical outlook has changed, and the rationale for adequate levels of ship maintenance capacity should change in style.
A new Navy shipyard, perhaps on the west coast, would be especially important in the timely maintenance of high-priority operations in the Pacific. And of course we needed new entrants in the maritime sector who could increase shipbuilding and maintenance capacity while innovating as the Navy expands its fleet and creates a new armada that will spark the imagination of a future generation of naval architects, shipyard workers can and sailors.
As the debate about our nation’s infrastructure deepens, it would be a mistake not to view the naval and nation’s maritime industries as strategic infrastructure. Efforts to reverse the slow erosion of the country’s shipyards are a welcome change from decades of divestments of marine infrastructure.
By funding the SIOP and building new shipyard capacity, Congress and the Biden Administration have the opportunity to reverse a decade-long disinvestment and atrophy of the naval infrastructure – and to use these expenditures to fulfill a constitutional duty to provide and maintain the country’s navy .
Brent D. Sadler is a Senior Research Fellow in Naval Warfare and Advanced Technology at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense. Maiya Clark is a research fellow at the Center for National Defense at Heritage. This piece was written for the Washington Post.
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