Future fleet: inefficient shipbuilding jeopardizes Navy's expansion goals.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: NAVY

The Navy owns 277 ships, but somehow manages to keep 551 different engines in its inventory. It has a fleet of 57 submarines, but maintains an array of 161 periscopes and masts.

Such inefficiencies partly explain why the cost of buying and maintaining ships has spiraled out of control. At a time when the Navy is seeking to begin a major expansion of the fleet--from 277 to 313 ships--these wasteful practices do not help.

"It's been a problem for 20 years," said Vice Adm. Paul Sullivan, head of the Naval Sea Systems Command.

Unless the Navy soon finds ways to build and operate ships less expensively, the planned expansion may be tough to achieve, Sullivan told a conference of the American Society of Naval Engineers.

"We've all heard the drumbeat of 313 ships," he said. "But there's all kinds of challenges to that."

The Navy will need to increase its annual spending on shipbuilding from about $10 billion currently to at least $15 billion, or as much as $22 billion, in order to reach 313 ships within the next three decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That will require shifting funds from other Navy accounts, such as operations, maintenance or possibly aircraft procurement.

Sullivan said he would prefer to not see a budgetary "dogfight" between ships and aircraft. Instead, the Navy should seriously tackle the inefficiencies in current ship programs to help generate the funds for future ship construction.

The Navy's aviation planners already have reduced costs by billions of dollars simply by consolidating types and models of aircraft and weapons, Sullivan said. "The Navy has to go down the same road with ships."

In the ship world, he noted, "We have lots of baselines." The current fleet has 29 ship models. There are plans to reduce that number to 27 by 2020, but that is not nearly enough, Sullivan said. "There is potential to neck down to nine ship models," although he warned that the goal is rather unrealistic. "Can we get down to nine ship types? Probably not. But we have to make progress toward that goal."

Then there is the proliferation of machinery. Besides the 551 engine variants, the Navy keeps a staggering inventory that includes 7,325 different motors, 36,979 types of valves, 268 air-conditioning unit models, 443 categories of generators--and the list goes on.

That wealth of equipment may have been justified back in the Cold War, when the Navy had a fleet of more than 600 ships. Much of that hardware would not be...