Navy Rushes ‘Unprecedented’ 1,600 Reservists To Shipyards As COVID Guts Workforce « Breaking Defense


Navy Rushes ‘Unprecedented’ 1,600 Reservists To Shipyards As COVID Guts Workforce « Breaking Defense

A dock at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard is flooded during the undocking of the Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine USS City of Corpus Christi.

WASHINGTON: The Navy has lost 50,000 workdays a month at its four public shipyards during the COVID-19 crisis, sparking concerns over delays in repairing and refitting nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines.

“This level of mobilization for maintenance is unprecedented,” said Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Hudson Institute. He noted that previous smaller mobilizations are regularly used to maintain reservist proficiency or augment shipyard workers on particular projects that are falling behind schedule.

Since the reservists, however, will need to follow the same social distancing and PPE rules as the civilian workers, “their activation really only helps make up for the about 25% of shipyard workers who haven’t been able to come into work or need to shift to more isolated duties because their age or pre-existing conditions make them more vulnerable to the effects of COVID-19,” Clark noted.

The reserve call-up, the largest in the Navy’s history, could last as long as a year Navy officials say, in order to ensure that critical work on those platforms gets done.

The losses have been piling up since mid-March, when local and state governments began implementing stay-at-home orders and companies tweaked shifts and work hours to allow workers to stay home or work in less-crowded environments.

The missed workdays have started to hurt repair and modernization work on the Navy’s nuclear-powered carrier and submarine fleets, two critical platforms Washington is increasingly relying on to show presence and monitor Chinese moves in the vast expanse of the Pacific and Indian oceans. In order to keep that work on track, Navy leaders have taken the extraordinary step of calling up 1,629 Reservists to fill in the gap at the shipyards. 

As manufacturing output has plummeted across the globe over the last several months, the delays have hit the Navy particularly hard. Across the service’s four public shipyards that do the majority of repair work on the submarine and carrier fleets, a full 25 percent of workers are not clocking in for their regular shifts. 

“Our Sailors are electricians, pipe fitters, sheet metal workers, plumbers, hydraulic technicians, mechanics, machinists, carpenters, welders and more,” Capt. Michael MacLellan, director of the Navy’s “SurgeMain” effort said in a statement. “Many of our people have prior experience at the shipyard where they’re being sent, down to the specific shop where they will be working alongside the shipyard’s organic civilian workforce.”

The deployments will begin in July, with all of the call-ups on-site at Navy-operated shipyards in Maine, Virginia, Washington state and Hawaii. 

“This level of mobilization for maintenance is unprecedented,” said Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Hudson Institute. He noted that previous smaller mobilizations are regularly used to maintain reservist proficiency or augment shipyard workers on particular projects that are falling behind schedule.

Since the reservists, however, will need to follow the same social distancing and PPE rules as the civilian workers, “their activation really only helps make up for the about 25% of shipyard workers who haven’t been able to come into work or need to shift to more isolated duties because their age or pre-existing conditions make them more vulnerable to the effects of COVID-19,” Clark noted.

Overall, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine will receive 267 Reservists; Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia will receive 486; Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington will receive 676; and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii will receive 200. All of the shipyards have a heavy submarine and aircraft carrier workload.

The Navy’s Surge Maintenance, or SurgeMain, program was created in 2005, and comprises 2,200 enlisted Reserve sailors and 240 Reserve officers to augment the Navy’s organic civilian shipyard workforce in times of crisis.

Andrew Hunter, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at CSIS, said he can’r recall any similar call-up, “and that’s despite the fact that the Navy has been dealing with a repair backlog for some time. In the past though, this backlog was driven by funding shortfalls rather than a shortage of workers. In that sense, it makes sense that the Navy is calling up a large number of reservists now.”

The surge comes as the Navy is looking to get more ships out to sea to meet the growing challenge of an increasingly adventurous Chinese navy, and years of backlogs at US shipyards which left ships pier-side for months past their scheduled departure dates. 

Just this past week, three American aircraft carrier strike groups were at sea in the Indo-Pacific for the first time in more than three years, a logistical lift the service has had a hard time sustaining.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Ronald Reagan are plying the waters of the Philippine Sea, while the USS Nimitz strike group is operating off the US West Coast. On the East Coast, the USS Harry Truman is returning to port at Norfolk in coming days after having been deployed 16 out of the last 32 months, and in need of an overdue maintenance period once pierside.

Getting ships out of their repair availability has been a focus of the Navy for some time, after years of lagging efforts culminating with only 30 percent of destroyers being able to get back to sea on time in recent years. 

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said in December he wanted to eliminate those delays by this fall.

“Our toughest near-term challenge is reversing the trend of delivering only 40 percent of our ships from maintenance on time.” Gilday wrote in a note to the fleet in December. “Our goal is to improve productivity, reduce lost days through depot availability extensions by 80 percent in FY20 compared with FY19, and eliminate lost days through depot extensions by the end of FY21.”

The COVID crisis already has Navy officials worried about its new nuclear-powered Columbia-class submarine, which is the service’s top acquisition priority.  

Earlier this month, it was revealed that worker absences at a critical supplier have delayed construction and welding of the boat’s missile tubes by several months, and the service is scrambling to make that time up.

Large-scale work on the first of the twelve planned Columbia submarines is slated to kick off in 2021, with deliveries starting in 2030 — just in time to begin replacing the Cold War-era Ohio-class subs as the Navy’s leg of the nation’s nuclear triad. The subs will carry 70 percent of the warheads allowed by the New Start treaty with Russia.

This spring, less than 30 percent of workers at UK-based Babcock Marine were showing up for work during the height of the COVID outbreak, leading to setbacks in the work schedule. Navy officials say they believe they can buy back that time in the coming months.

There are also concerns over a potential strike at the private Bath shipyard in Maine, where workers are on the verge of walking off the job after their labor union rejected what the company called its last, best offer in a bitter contract dispute. The company’s President, Dirk Lesko, said recently the yard is already running six months behind schedule on building several new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, even as he scrambles to hire several thousand new workers.  

It’s unclear what the final outcome will be, but for now Machinists Union Local S6, which represents some 4,300 workers, and the company, are holding firm to their respective positions. The current contract had been due to expire May 17 but both sides agreed to extend it to June 21 in the wake of COVID-19 disruptions. 




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