Portland Press Herald April 17, 2005
Fleet changes may lower shipyard's value
By Tom Bell
Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery is the more vulnerable of Maine's two military bases, according to the consensus of defense experts.
It's the Navy's lead maintenance shipyard for the Los Angeles class nuclear-powered submarine, a fast and nimble boat that forms the bulk of the Navy's nuclear-powered attack submarine fleet. The shipyard holds the record for overhauling these submarines under budget and ahead of schedule.
But the fleet is shrinking. At the height of the Cold War, the United States had more than 100 submarines. It now has 54, and the Navy recently announced plans to reduce its attack submarine fleet to 41.
"It's hard to argue that the prospect for the nuclear sub force is bright," said Jay Korman, an analyst with DFI International, a defense industry research and consulting firm. "We are on a glide path for a smaller submarine fleet."
Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is a specialty yard, currently equipped to work on smaller attack submarines rather than the much larger ballistic-missile submarines. The nation's other three naval shipyards work on attack submarines, ballistic-missile submarines and ships.
Two - the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Wash., and the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii - serve the Pacific Fleet. This fleet is strategically more important than the Atlantic Fleet because of potential threats from North Korea and China.
Also, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard is protected from being closed because it is the only yard licensed to dispose of the nuclear waste retrieved from decommissioned submarines.
If the Pentagon closes a shipyard, analysts say, it's more likely to be one on the East Coast, either Portsmouth Naval Shipyard or Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia.
While the Maine shipyard is isolated from other military facilities, the Virginia shipyard is in the center of one of the largest concentrations of military power in the world. It is the Navy's most multifaceted shipyard. It services the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, which is based next door at the Norfolk Naval Base, the world's largest naval base.
The region is home to nine major military installations and several large private shipyards that employ tens of thousands of people and receive military contracts.
Norfolk Naval Shipyard promotes itself as a full-service shipyard. "You can bring any job - no matter the size - to NNSY because of its location and layout," the shipyard says on its official Navy Web site. Its motto: "Service to the Fleet Under Four Flags."
But even the concept of a government-owned shipyard is under attack from those who argue that it's cheaper to farm out submarine overhauls to private shipyards. And as they build fewer Navy ships, private shipyards will turn toward the type of overhaul and maintenance work that Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and the other Navy shipyards do.
Private shipyards are putting enormous political pressure on Congress and the Bush administration to take over that work, said Bill McDonough, a former commander at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and a leader of the effort to keep it open.
He said Navy shipyards can perform the work cheaper and more quickly than private yards. But he believes the concept of a government-run shipyard runs counter to the goals of ideologues in Washington
"Our competition is the private sector," he said. "There is no reason in the world to close the shipyard other than a political decision to suck work out and give it to another sector."
Portsmouth Naval Shipyard also faces a problem of changing technology. It specializes in refueling the older Los Angeles class submarines, a two-year process that requires removing the reactor. But submarines that never need refueling are gradually replacing these older submarines.
The USS Honolulu, commissioned in 1985, is the Navy's last submarine that will need refueling, a job scheduled for around 2007, said John Pike, a military scholar at GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va.
When that job is finished, the Maine shipyard will lose much of its military value, he said.
When he looks at the nation's other bases, he said, it's hard to figure how the military could justify closing them. But in the Kittery shipyard's case, he said, he can see why: The base is becoming obsolete.
"It looks like Portsmouth may be road kill," he said.
The official Navy view is that the nation's four naval shipyards - along with private shipyards - can operate together as "one shipyard."
The concept allows the Navy to be more efficient with its shipyards and gives it more flexibility to move work around the yards where and when it's needed, said Shirley Copeland, a spokesperson for the Naval Sea Systems Command
But there is only so much work to go around. In 1987, there were 594 ships. There are now 288 ships, a decline of more than 50 percent.
"How big a navy are we going to have? That's the most important question," said Art Collins, executive director of the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, a planning agency for communities in the Norfolk region.
He said the people who work on ships and submarines in Maine and Virginia share the same fate.
"If we are going to have a 250-ship navy, he said, "then we are both in trouble."
© Copyright 2005, Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
