Note: The author is the Director of Polar Intelligence for Davie Group. The opinions and views expressed at Sixty Degrees North belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.
On July 17th, Admiral Jamie Foggo, USN (Ret.) sat down with William Toti, Performing the Duties of Under Secretary of the Navy, on the Navy League’s Center for Maritime Security podcast, Maritime Nation.
Here’s Toti’s thesis:
Every system is perfectly designed to produce the outcome it produces. So the system of ship building is perfectly designed to… deliver ships late and over budget. So we need to redesign the system.
I encourage those of you interested in how the U.S. Navy is reforming the shipbuilding process to listen/watch the entire fifty-three minute interview. YouTube link here (but it is also available wherever you find podcasts):
I thought I’d pull out a few salient points to give readers a taste of what they will find in the interview.
Note that quotes from the podcast were taken from YouTube’s automatic transcript then checked for accuracy and edited for readability and clarity by the author.
When I first joined government a year ago, one of my tasks was to figure out how we can get ship numbers up within this current administration in a material way. And marginal improvements in our current ship builders doesn’t get us there. Building a new shipyard might, but that doesn’t get us there within the current administration. And so we started talking about purchasing ships from foreign shipyards and using the ICE Pact model where we would transition production from the foreign shipyard to an American shipyard yet to be built.
And so you know I think that’s still the right answer. We understand why there’s some antibodies to that notion in Congress. But we’re not going to reduce our demand signal for destroyers. We’re not going to buy destroyers this way. There’s no threat to our destroyer shipyards in Maine and in Mississippi. No threat. This is additive, not duplicative or replacing.
Note: The JROC is an administrative board chaired by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and made up of the Vice Chiefs of each military service. Its general purpose was to give all the services a voice in major acquisition programs, which required pulling those decisions away from the individual services.
It [the JROC] was a Kabuki dance, right? The JROC… never met a requirement it didn’t love. It wasn’t quite a rubber stamp, it would modulate things a little bit but it would take way too long, 18 months to two years, to declare that yes this is a valid requirement we should kick it over to the acquisition folks. So you ask yourself after some time what value does it add?
The other thing it did was it deprioritized multi-mission platforms because you were supposed to not bring material solutions into the JROC, you’re supposed to bring pure requirements. So, you have a requirement for anti-submarine warfare and you say, “Well, that’s a submarine.” You weren’t allowed to say it... you couldn’t count the fact that submarine could shoot tomahawks. That’s not ASW. That’s a different requirement, right?
So when you matrix scored these things as to what had most impact you know you couldn’t count the multi-mission platforms for all the different missions they were doing because you were scoring them against one set of requirements… a lack of common sense.
In Contracting:
When I was in industry… I was frustrated over and over and over again by the lack of unity on the government side. You had somebody who owned requirements who wanted you to go in this direction. You had a program manager who wanted to go a slightly different direction.
You’ve got a PEO (Program Executive Officer) who probably wasn’t as engaged as that person should have been. And you had a contracting officer who actually held all the real authority. And time after time after time, we would agree on a certain course of action between program requirements and industry, my business, only to be kneecapped by the contracting officer. Because the contracting officer didn’t work for the PEO. So that was the first thing we knew we needed to fix.
So we need to realign the acquisition side so that everybody works for one person and that person gets to make all the decisions.
In Technical Authority/Decisions:
You and I drove submarines that were perfectly safe and very effective. But they weren’t designed under criteria called non deviation like the Virginia class is. There were certain systems in our submarines that were absolutely non deviation. Submarine safe systems, weapon systems, control systems, reactor. But you didn’t have to worry about your emergency air breathing bracket being a quarter of an inch off. The Virginia class submarine was 100% non-deviation so if anything was off of plan it had to be written up and some government engineer had to approve the deviation and so we had thousands and thousands with zero value added.
Why was this allowed to happen? Because the technical authority didn’t work for the PEO. So, we had that was the second thing we had to fix.
This is what led to the creation of Program Acquisition Executives (PAEs), who, according to a U.S. Navy press release:
“PAEs will have direct authority not only for program offices but also over associated technical, contracting, and sustainment functions, providing true cradle-to-grave control to deliver fully integrated capability,” said Mr. Jason Potter, Performing the Duties of Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition (ASN RDA). “We are moving from a compliance-based bureaucracy to having outcome-focused organizations, fundamentally changing how we do business.”
According to UNSI News, PAE Maritime reached initial operating capability (IOC) on July 20th.
Some programs, like submarine construction, were deemed so important that their Program Manager reports directly to the Deputy Secretary of War. These are known as DRPMs (Direct Report Program Managers). There are others (such as for Golden Dome).
I said earlier that the government’s zeal on cost is often counterproductive. An example of that is that an inappropriate focus on cost often results in an increase in cost.
Because the biggest cost driver is actually schedule. So, if I idle a submarine yard, if I idle Electric Boat for five or six months because they don’t have the parts they need, they don’t have the components they need, somebody’s late to deliver, that overhead you’re paying to keep that yard running results in zero production.
I could keep going, as Mr. Toti also discusses the need for the $1.5 trillion budget to make up for years of neglect in the supply chain, the importance of longer contracts and predictability in procurement, and many other interesting topics. Make time to listen to the whole thing.
One interesting sea story from Mr. Toti is how he helped clear the name of the Commanding Officer of the USS Indianapolis.
For those not familiar with the story of this vessel, here is an excerpt from the USS Indianapolis Official Website:
USS Indianapolis served President Roosevelt as ship of state, and Admiral Spruance as the 5th Fleet flagship in WWII. She fought gallantly through many campaigns, earning ten battle stars. Her final top-secret mission was to carry parts of the first atomic bomb used in combat to a U.S. airbase on Tinian.
Just a few nights later, on July 30th, she fell prey to a Japanese submarine. In the next twelve minutes of fire and chaos, about 330 of her crew would be lost with the ship, and the rest--some 860 men--would be left alone in the Pacific in the middle of the night. For the next 5 days, without food or water, the crew battled the elements, dodged shark attacks, and clung to life as best they could.
Her sinking led to the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy. Of the 1,195 sailors and marines on board, only 316 survived.
Her Commanding Officer, Captain Charles McVay, was convicted at Court Martial of “hazarding his ship by failing to zig-zag.” He took his own life in 1968.
Captain McVay’s conviction was expunged by Congress in 2001. For all the details on this interesting story, I recommend visiting the USS Indianapolis Official Website
People often ask me why I think U.S. Navy and Coast Guard shipbuilding programs have generally gone poorly. I think I’ll start sending them to this podcast, as Mr. Toti has a great vantagepoint from which to diagnose the problems and implement solutions.
With regard to the problems associated with the technical authority, I encountered something similar during my Active-Duty time. As engineering and maintenance experience among sailors dwindled, the Navy relied instead on oversight and overly detailed technical instructions. The inspectors might not know anything about the equipment, but they could judge whether the technician followed the procedure exactly, with no deviation. That is not a recipe for long-term competence.
Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think in the comments.
All the Best,
PGR
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