NAVSEA Maintaining Navy's Culture of Readiness
NAVSEA News
07 March 2003
By JOC David Nagle, Naval Sea Systems Command Public Affairs
WASHINGTON - The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark, in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 25, said the Navy is making readiness a key element of its culture.
Maintaining this "culture of readiness" means having ships and submarines ready to deploy anywhere, at any time, and able to stay deployed indefinitely. And that means having a strong, efficient maintenance and industrial base.
"We are in the trenches of the culture of readiness," said Rear Adm. William Klemm, Naval Sea Systems Command's deputy commander for logistics, maintenance and industrial operations during a February 27 media roundtable at the Washington Navy Yard. Klemm oversees the Fleet's maintenance efforts through its four Naval shipyards, intermediate maintenance activities and supervisors of shipbuilding, as well as many of the logistics and systems that support ships at sea.
"We are the people who carry the wrenches, plan the maintenance requirements and execute the plans," he emphasized.
Sea Enterprise, part of the strategic triad in the Chief of Naval Operations' Sea Power 21 vision, is a different way and approach to how the Navy does business, said Klemm.
"It is a marked change from the days of the Cold War when ships returned from deployment and reconstituted," he said. "Today, we are talking about surging ships and keeping them operating on a non-rotational basis."
To do that and meet the demands of the global war on terrorism, NAVSEA's challenge is to stabilize and maintain a flexible industrial base to surge, sustain and reconstitute the Navy.
Distance support is one of the ways the Navy is sustaining the deployed fleet. Using state-of-the-art information technology, ships at sea are linked with experts at technical centers ashore and receive real-time support to correct maintenance issues. The advantage of Distance Support, Klemm said, is the ability to provide such support while keeping the ship at sea and without the delay faced when sending a technician to the ship.
"Distance Support allows us to take advantage of reduced resources and really leverage our expertise in this process," he said. "It is rapidly becoming the primary means of repair during overseas operations."
A surface force initiative, SHIPMAIN, is underway and is designed to improve the way the Navy maintains a surged force. SHIPMAIN is examining the way the Navy plans ship maintenance and exploring ways to streamline and standardize the planning process.
"We are very rapidly applying metrics to measure the effective pieces of the planning and engineering processes, materiel ordering and the modernization pieces that bring our ships up to current standards and improve their warfighting capability," explained Klemm, who serves as "chief operating officer" of SHIPMAIN. "That effort is going to start completely paying for itself as well as reducing the number of people involved in the planning process and expediting the planning process."
On the submarine side, the Submarine Factory initiative is taking advantage of shipyards' resources to effectively handle the submarine maintenance workload. Klemm said in the next two years, about one-third of our submarines will hit their maintenance cycles at the same time. "That's when the Submarine Factory is going to earn its keep," he said.
Other initiatives such as public/private partnerships; multi-year, multi-option contracting; and realigning/consolidating maintenance activities will allow the Navy to meet the challenge of sustaining ships and submarines and making Sea Enterprise a reality.
"Sea Enterprise is not just [changing] how we're organized but how we do our business," said Klemm. "It represents a change in the culture of readiness that means we're ready to go 24 hours a day."
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