Navy Ship Maintenance

This report reviews the Navy's practice of using temporary duty assignments of naval shipyard personnel to perform ship maintenance and repair work at homeports without nearby naval shipyard capability. GAO reviews (1) the rationale supporting the Navy's practice, (2) the cost effectiveness of these assignments, and (3) the factors affecting future requirements for the practice.

GAO noted that: (1) the Navy's rationale for temporary duty assignments is twofold; (2) such assignments are required to perform work at locations where no local public or private shipyards have the required depot-level maintenance capability; (3) most temporary duty assignments are for this reason; (4) the Navy performs work at such locations to comply with its policy to perform ship repairs of six months or less at the ship's homeport and when it is not practical to bring ships to the shipyard; (5) the Navy believes that using temporarily excess naval shipyard workers on temporary duty assignment is cost-effective, even when there is local private-sector capability because these workers will be needed in the future to perform ship repair work; (6) the Navy's rationale for sending temporarily excess naval shipyard personnel on temporary duty assignments appears reasonable from a cost and operational standpoint; (7) however, in some cases, other approaches may be more cost-effective; (8) the Navy is currently retaining some temporarily excess shipyard personnel to ensure that it can handle the planned refuelings of nuclear attack submarines for fiscal year (FY) 1999 and beyond; (9) retaining the personnel for these purposes appears reasonable, since the Navy has a need for the personnel; (10) it is following the same practice to perform nuclear ship repair work at San Diego because local private shipyards do not have nuclear capability; (11) however, other approaches, such as making greater use of the private sector, may warrant consideration; (12) possible changes to future ship repair workloads could affect the requirement for future temporary duty assignments and retention of current naval shipyard personnel levels; (13) for example, the Navy has cancelled 17 planned nuclear attack submarine refuelings since FY 1993; (14) further reductions in the number of planned refuelings would substantially decrease the on-site workloads planned for three naval shipyards, especially Portsmouth; (15) a proposal to homeport three nuclear aircraft carriers in San Diego, California, which does not have a local naval shipyard, could substantially increase temporary duty assignments; and (16) other factors that could affect the amount of future temporary duty assignments include: (a) further reductions in the number of Navy ships; (b) full implementation of the Navy's Regional Maintenance Program; and (c) a new round of base closures.

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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