Navy Maintenance

Recognizing that fewer ship repairs will be needed in the future, the Navy plans to cut the size of the public shipyard work force by about one-third by fiscal year 1995. The shipyards, however, have been told to continue to base their mobilization planning on an outdated model, that of a protracted global war, because the Pentagon has yet to issue new planning guidance on the regional conflicts that are more likely in the 1990s and beyond. Given the sweeping changes in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, the Navy should consider downsizing ship repair operations to a cost-effective level that will meet future peacetime needs while also allowing the Navy to meet reasonable contingency requirements. The Navy should use more realistic planning estimates and the reassessment of requirements as a basis for considering whether to recommend closing more public shipyards.

GAO found that: (1) future peacetime maintenance requirements will decline due to a reduction in the number of ships in the fleet and less maintenance-intensive ship designs; (2) the number of Navy ships decreased from 568 ships in fiscal year 1987 to 526 in fiscal year 1991; (3) due to decreased peacetime ship repair requirements, the Navy plans to let free-market forces prevail in the private shipyards, schedule one public shipyard for closure, and reduce work-force levels at public shipyards; (4) although the Department of Defense (DOD) has shifted its wartime planning focus from a single global scenario to an array of regional scenarios, the Navy has continued to base its ship repair planning on the global scenario; and (5) the Navy may be planning to maintain more ship repair capacity than it will need to meet future peacetime and wartime requirements.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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