Navy shifts shipbuilding dollars to mid-tier yards.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.
• Position: Shipbuilding

Most of the Navy's large warships are built at the nation's "big four" yards in Avondale, La.; Pascagoula, Miss.; Bath Iron Works, Maine; and NASSCO, Calif.

But as the Navy seeks to build smaller vessels for coastal patrols and other nontraditional missions, it plans to shift some of its ship construction dollars to smaller yards, officials said.

"We are going to a broader range of ships so we are building more in mid-tier yards. That's a particularly good thing," said Rear Adm. William E. Landay III, the Navy's program executive officer for ships.

Vessels that are being built at mid-tier yards include the littoral combat ship and the joint high speed vessel.

Building Navy ships at smaller yards has both pluses and minuses, said retired Rear Adm. Charles Hamilton, a former program executive officer for Navy ships.

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Smaller yards work on fewer ships so the workforce is highly focused on malting those products well, Hamilton said. But they may lack the technical knowledge to manage complex military ship programs, he added. Some yards may not have sufficient expertise in "earned value management," for example, he said. EVM is a project management technique that is used to measure a program's performance and cost execution.

For the Navy, a "universal declaration that 'we'll go to non-traditional yards' would not solve the question" of how to build ships more efficiently, Hamilton said.

U.S. yards often are criticized for building ships at far higher costs than foreign yards do. That comparison...