Sea Control - Sea Control 291 - Changing the Surface Navy's Maintenance Culture with CDR Ike Harris

Episode Date: November 7, 2021

Links:1.  Change the Surface Navy’s Maintenance Philosophy, by Commander Isaac Harris, Proceedings, Aug 2021.2. Comprehensive Review of Recent Surface Force Incidents, US Fleet Forces Command, Oct 26, 2017.3. Fleet Review Panel of Surface Force Readiness (The Balisle Report), by VADM Balisle, Feb 26, 2010.

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by my friend, Commander I. Karras, and we'll be discussing his proceedings article on the Surface Navy's maintenance culture. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Gruver. We recently conducted our SimSec Forum for Authors and Readers in conjunction with the Center for Naval Analysis. You should be able to find a link on our main website and see a few of our great contributors presenting their work as well as answering some audience questions. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, my guest is Commander Ike Harris, and we're going to discuss his recent proceedings article, Change the Surface Navy's Maintenance Philosophy. So thanks for coming on, Ike. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about your background, please? Yes, I'm a pretty standard SWO. I've done tours in San Diego, Mayport. My department tours were in Norfolk as well as my command tour, XOC of Ramage. Most of my other short duties have been in the Pentagon, either in NAFNAV or in Joint Staff. So lots of good SWO-ness.

Thanks. And as a reminder, all of you today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated. So we're going to jump right into your article here. And you started on a really upbeat note, talking about the striking difference going from a Baseline 5 Flight 1 DDG, the USS Cole, in your first department head tour to a Baseline 9 ship for your XOCO ride. Before I ask you what was so different about those two, I'll just point out is that Ramage is actually hull number 61, Cole is 67.

She actually went to an older ship the second time around, but with a significantly upgraded combat system. So what was so different about the about the combat system when you report on board ramage? So I would say when I, you know, really, when I got to Cole, she was already, you know, dated, you know, she was a 539 baseline when I got there in 2012. So she'd been around for several years. She had gotten a little bit of an upgrade after the bombing. But for the most part was still, you know, pretty early on flight one. Ramage, same thing, if not older. I had some friends, teammates that were on Ramage when I was a department head, a very similar setup. When Ramage went through the midlife upgrade, she got a significant change to her, not only combat systems load, but a lot of the hardware that goes into the Aegis baseline got replaced with, at the time, probably four years ago now, top of the line computing power that was available.

So significant reduction in just the size of everything, as well as the computing power, but it also allowed for a lot more efficiency and ergonomics inside the combat system. So previously, you know, with the 539 baseline, you had consoles that were doing specific warfare areas that were fairly limited to that warfare area. With the new baseline, you can mix and match glass screens. You can mix and match where somebody sits. If you have more redundancy, if you lose a console, there's more redundancy in the actual radar itself. You get a lot more interoperability with the BMD suite. In the 539 baseline, when you had a BMD, you had a significant time change to reload the program into the BMD mode from normal Aegis mode to BMD. with uh the baseline nine that's you know flick of a switch you know really took the ages you know

five three nine ship that you know the baseline uh the flight one uh into the 21st century and along with that uh increasing computing power and the change in the combat suite itself in ages you had a significant increase to the electronic warfare suite uh some new missile systems that are available you know it's just it is really you know it should be considered a new class of ship, just in the difference that it brings. When I got there, we deployed shortly after, about six months into my tour, when I was XO, we did about, of a six-month, seven-month deployment, we did about four and a half of it in the Gulf. And it was substantial, the combat power and the reach that had changed from the 539. Yeah, I don't think the uninitiated really

appreciates sort of the combat system that you and I grew up with in the early 2000s into the early 2010s and the change when you talk about the computing power that the combat information center that you and I would walk into is ensigns lieutenant junior grades and lieutenants largely running on 1970s and 1980s computing power it was very you know optimized to do one specific thing uh role to role there but some of that optimism yield to reality a little bit when you started working through the maintenance process uh probably during deployment and then post deployment Certainly. But what is your experience attempting to prepare for and execute a selected restricted availability or SRA during your tour? And if you don't mind, if you could explain a little bit what what an SRA is.

Yes, I think to somebody who is not steeped in ship life, you know, an SRA is just a shipyard period. So something that's a lot more extended than what you would normally do when the ship is in its normal life cycle, going to sea regularly. So things that happen in our SRA, our Selected Restricted Availability, we defueled multiple fuel tanks. We were in the water. We were not in a dry dock. So there was some management of liquid load as we were doing different things. In the first half of the SRA, we had certain tanks empty. They would get in there and do preservation inside the tank or cut out steel or whatever they had to do. And then we had to shift liquid load to other tanks.

Those tanks, once they were finished, would be filled. And then we'd empty out other tanks, keep us at a stable draft the whole time. But extremely extensive in terms of the level with which you're getting into, especially the hull. you know a lot of the things well to take a step back even further you know we we start planning sras the sra previously right so really when you're you know i think our our previous sra from the one that we completed in in 2020 to 21 uh was i think 18 2018 so you know and they were when they were in that sra in 17 and 18 you know the port engineer and the maintenance team were looking at jobs that they were going to assign to the next sra you know three to four years later

uh and you can think about all the things that happened to a ship in three to four years of a very active life cycle they're off tempo now so there were things that you know the ship is constantly doing maintenance we have continuous maintenance availabilities which we're doing once a quarter for about three to four weeks at a time but uh there are just there's a level of intrusiveness you just can't get into when the ship is operational um and uh you know one of the things we found when you know it kind of struck me as concerning when we first started to get in the yards was how much growth occurred in what we thought were some fairly small jobs you know they just couldn't find good steel um so you know one of the one of the big you know

exemplars of this problem was uh our our chemical protective system which is essentially the ventilation system the ship has to seal in your positive ventilation to keep out uh you know bad chemical agents um that gets a lot of airflow obviously it's salt you know salt air coming from the sea and um what was initially supposed to be you know five to ten feet of steel they ended up cutting about 40 or 50 feet um of full steel you know about an eight foot compartment uh high you know from the deck to the bulk the overhead uh and essentially replacing the entire thing because once they started getting in there it looked you know that you could where you could see the corrosion uh was not that bad however once they started actually trying to remove the paint

and then find good steel to weld to it just ate up the entire you know side of the bulkhead there and um and that you know that is you know kind of the point i make in the article is that's absolutely the most expensive way to do it because instead of instead of planning a job for you know what could have been 40 or 50 square feet of steel replacement and putting that in the timeline and stacking it into you know makes sense inside the sra package and you know the best time to do it what they thought was going to be a couple week job ended up turning into about six to eight weeks of just full work that really had some you know intrusive aspects to other jobs so uh that wasn't you know and and that one job in the cps room was not an aberration that was that was there

were several jobs we got into that we uh there were there were far worse when we found them um we started digging into them and you know pulling back some of the paint than we anticipated so i just don't at this point you know the the the contracting process is trying to get a stability as early as possible and we bid out the contracts early so that we can have a stable process to bid and then have the contractor come back so that there's there's more ability to plan uh doing things last minute um and that kind of has a double-edged sword you know the earlier you move the contract lock date the more stuff that the more lifetime of the ship you're not getting to take into account so how did we get here with our current

maintenance process like you and i have you know experienced this for the last two decades but how did we arrive in 2021 so one of the things that um about halfway through my yard uh period uh it It was a 15-month yard cycle or yard period, and then about nine months in, I started kind of jotting down notes, and I was like, I need to do something with this. And I kind of went back to some of the source material to kind of look at where the Navy had come from and how we kind of got to that point, not just on Ramage, but as a Navy. And one of the big things I pulled was the comprehensive review and the Belisle report. And both those things lay out what I think everybody kind of knows. The Navy had to make some tough choices over really post-2001 in the global war on terror. And I think those choices were to sacrifice short-term maintenance and readiness of the ships by shortening yard periods to achieve greater availability.

So we've done various plans that have reflected that. But the goal was to get more operational time out of our ships because that was what the country demanded for good reason. That also combined with the fact that in 1991, I think, give or take, we had the highest ship count we had since World War II, 600 ship Navy, and we go down to about 300 and stay there right around 2001. So right as the country is starting to go into an extended period of combat and really the necessity of having ships at sea presence around the world for various reasons, various combat operations, we're at the lowest number we've had in a long time. And that has taken a toll. I don't think that was – I'm not critical of that decision. I think it was done for a lot of good reasons. it just the the toll of that 20 years of higher op tempo has kind of come due especially for the

ships that uh really spent the majority of their life cycle you know operating in that in that environment so you know to talk about the flight one dgs in particular you know the workhorse of the fleet berks commission 91 so she was already 10 years old by the time 2001 came around you know that's that has spent you know 20 years of her 30 year of her 30 year life has been spent at a higher than intended when commissioned op tempo and you know that that goes really for all the flight ones and that leads right in my next question so what were the original assumptions baked in the burke's plan 35 year service life and how have those held up so um i tried to look into that to specifically find what some of the assumptions were i found some and some some documenting

documentation about what how ship life was uh ship life expectations were created the reasonable man approach you can say that you know when when arlie burke was ordered in 1985 the world was a very different place so you know 30 of a ship's life was spent deployed i think it was like actually lower than that was in the high 20s and it was a very stable you know uh workup cycle deployment six month deployment back in and that that was a very set cycle of that of that time frame and srs were much more predictable uh you didn't have the extended deployments we You know, we hadn't started doing the European phase adaptive approach of BMD presence, which was all the flight ones also. So that kind of, you know, my ship Cole, when I was a department head, did a nine month deployment,

ramaged in a couple of back to back deployments at that time. So we just didn't we anticipate, you know, the shipyard, the ship planners, Navy anticipated a fairly stable life cycle of workup deployment SRA, which was going to be give or take about two years and um with a number of ships that was give or take 600 or thereabouts and and by the time 2001 rolls around you know we're about 50 higher on our availability so we're doing you know almost time and a half the uh deployment time and you know that that's that's a that's a static number so if that that time is going to come from somewhere and most of the time it comes from you know maintenance periods so it adds up how does your typical sra unfold now right was was the process so give or take like i said about four

years three to four years out you're looking at um the big jobs uh there's some organizations in the navy surf met being one of them uh that look at um you know class-wide issues or tanks or or you know systems that need to be checked based on other ships other similar ships that have had problems those can be looked at a little bit more preventatively and then you have your you know your specific jobs that you know about things that you the ship's seen through pms put a job in you know casualties you had um those things are all laid out and approximately i want to say about six months out or so the package closes and then that it's good it gets planned those jobs get planned and then it gets bid out to um to a to the general shipyards and the um those you know

shipyards come back with a competitive bid the navy uh takes that bid and then you go into planning you know two to three months out from the actual execution ship rolls in and and then you kind of go to town i think the the first 20 is called open and inspect first 20 of the time there's a number of tanks that are supposed to be open and inspected based on that uh that class-wide average and you know ship shipbuilding specialists from the regional maintenance center come over they look through those tanks you know there's a lot of refueling defueling you know kind of setting up scaffolding all these things to long term they go on to that very beginning and you kind of get into the nug work of actually doing uh the steel and you know more of the substantial actual you

know cutting and grinding of of pieces of the ship and the last two to three months the last 20 or so is really putting everything back together and turning it back on again and you know depending on the the length of your availability uh and the extent of one that you know the whole material side but also you know whatever you got in your combat systems um that can be the turning things back on can be fairly frustrating you know we we for instance had a fairly minor upgrade to the the Aegis suite and we went up, we didn't change baselines. We went up like a increment, but we had our entire overhead of the pilot house replaced,

which is quite extensive. And you have, you know, every, everything has to come off of the overhead. You know, that's a lot, there's a lot of antennas up there. So we just, you know, the things that we sort of had to deal with as we put things back together, got that steel in and then, you know, super sensitive now with all the fiber optics and, and other, you know, much more sensitive pieces of equipment you have on now so small things that just get you know bumped or whatever during a repair end up being you know substantial repairs that had to be done

in addition to the intended repair so so you know it is you know it is by far i think an underappreciated uh by the community perhaps that uh how how absolutely complicated those shipyards are i think as swows you know we think about you know going to sea and and the training cycle and all these, you know, sort of, you know, John Paul Jones kind of, you know, taking the fight to the enemy kind of stuff, but which is absolutely critical. But I think the SRA process and execution is something we probably could use, spend a little more time on in our training cycles, particularly at the CO and department level to give a real understanding of, you know, hey, you got to be the shepherds of your equipment and you have to be knee deep in the job, even

though you know you may not be there for the whole time or or even we're not there for any of the planning cycle uh if you're the guy on the ship when when the sra is going down you need to be really knee-deep in the details because it's going to be up to the ship force to really make sure that things don't go sideways can you explain your argument that the current metric on time on budget incentivizes deferring structural repair yeah so i i think you know there's again again it goes back to availability right so we um you know we we have ships to go to sea uh that's it's the reason you have a ship you know we we try and schedule sras so that we have a predictable cycle of deployment following the sra so that on time on budget is you know that navy has

incentivized after some periods of you know fairly extensive ship yard delays to try and get the ships out on time obviously but you know and on budget as well but the flip side of that is it And it just, I think, is an unintended consequence, incentivizes the maintenance team to look at whether or not things that come up during the SRA should be done during the SRA or can be moved or postponed until the next SRA. And then you get into, you know, and there is technical review that goes on at the Regional Maintenance Center to assist those decisions, and it's done as a maintenance team. but it is something that is not you know in a perfect world i think you would you would fix everything right uh but that's not really where we live you know it takes it takes more money to do things um in situ than it does if they're planned out uh there are uh you know ships are very complex and that there are a lot of interrelated systems so it's not just like you're you can fix

one tank and it has no effect on anything else so say you know interference that has to be removed you know in an engineering space could be a very extensive repair even though it's not a huge problem uh you know per se is you know what piece of corrosion or something so it just it pushes it pushes us to say hey can we can we just live with this for you know another couple or three years until we get the ship back for the next sra and um i think part of the problem and part of my argument was that i don't think we uh are fully capturing that risk as a cumulative factor so So there are several, you know, when you start looking at, you know, several repairs for an individual ship, you know, the repairs you're sort of deferring based on technical advice. I don't think anybody ever comes together at the end and says, okay, so we've deferred, you know, this set number of jobs and that cumulative risk is X.

you know that maybe this ship shouldn't go do a high north deployment or um you know or just what you know some other factors to take into account and say you know we think she's safe to go to sea obviously she wouldn't be if if we didn't think so but you know there's probably some level of of operations that we want to limit her to or sea state maybe a reduction sea state uh that we can have her operate in while that's going on or you know whatever the case may be based on the actual repair uh that's getting deferred i think i think that's where the navy could do a little bit better to try to just get that you know what what is that risk you know and it ends up being you know on the crew to to sail her and i think the crew uh deserves to have that that articulation let's

get into your suggestion then uh what is your proposal for a new philosophy and then how would you operationalize that so one of the big things that i noticed as part of the upgrades of the uh the baseline line but not not just with the combat suite but also with um the engineering piece and is that everything is computerized now they're they're the daily log keepers and the guys are walking around the spaces uh they're taking data off of all kinds of equipment all the time the the system is producing reams loads and loads of data they're they're monitored systems so I think we've probably reached a level where you could take that data, combine it with some other things like deferred work in an SRA, manning, if a ship's manning is lower than it should be, or maybe if it's higher, and then create a virtual twin that you could model some of these things. and then determine what will be the effect if we defer this

or what's the cumulative effect when we defer all these things or if we're going to have her do a longer time between SRAs, if we're going to shorten this SRA because of cost. I think that would give us a much better picture of where the ship's at. It also would lend to a greater understanding of class-wide issues. And I think from the AI at the machine learning side, I think there's some lessons we could pull from just having that ability to track things in a very granular level, because a lot of that data is already being produced, qualitative measures such as, like I said, crew size, deployment time, deferred work, and put that into one model to give you a much better understanding of where the ship's at.

And I think that would be a quantum leap in the ability to predict what a ship is currently capable of and what things you could defer and what things have to be done right away. I want to say, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe what you were advocating for is bringing back the readiness squadrons to do some of that work. So what were the readiness squadrons and how do you envision those looking moving forward if we were to bring those back? Absolutely. So one of the things that Bly report had specifically called out was the fact that you had a readiness squadron that was this responsibility was solely for material readiness of the surface vessels in its charge. We combine that with the Desron and we sort of put two very different hats on that on that that squadron commander. One to prepare his staff for for combat as an operational commander of a strike group. So, you know, multiple ships at a very high level of combat, as well as tracking and, you know, shepherding his ships through a maintenance cycle.

Just the nature of the way our squadrons are structured, that means that you may have, you know, multiple ships at very different parts of the ship cycle, ship life cycle, at a squadron at one time. That could be a good thing based on workload. It could be a bad thing if everybody's, you know, doing the same, you know, for instance, at one point, we had three or four LOAs and inserts all just, you know, right, right, one another, right back to back within about a two-month period. And that puts a significant tax on the staff. There's just not a level of focus that you can lend to individual ships if you are trying to both prepare your staff for, you know, operational combat and deployments. You know, certainly that's becoming a greater task now with the return to great power competition and the higher level of warfare that we're practicing on a day-to-day basis now on our training exercises. You know, that's, I think, where the Desron, at least in my opinion, the Desron should be focused is really making sure that when the Desron Commodore and their staff deploy, that they're as ready as possible for high-end warfare against a pure adversary. I think that the challenge and readiness is equal to that challenge of great power competition.

And I think we should put a staff at that level that is also in charge and can really focus on the lessons learned and the trends and the history of ship maintenance that can be garnered when you're doing it as your primary job. I think that would be a huge step forward because it would give that guy, you know, that common or readiness larger CEO a much greater ability to influence specific yard periods and have that corporate knowledge that you really just don't get right now because they're stretched within. And I think what we've kind of done in Yoko after the comprehensive review and the strategic review, that's sort of that model, as well as down in Mayport with the class run is a similar thing. We just haven't quite fully implemented it in the fleet contractors of San Diego and Norfolk. So final question here is you spoke earlier about the need for CEO, department heads, ship's company to really focus on and prepare for that SRA, as well as shepherding it through the execution phase. But what's the time commitment for a ship's company to properly plan for an avail?

And then what sort of competing priorities did you find as you set up for your own? I think part of the COXO pipeline is to go to a TICOM INDOC before you actually step on board the ship as an XO. And that's a fantastic opportunity because it gives you a lot of the COXO pipeline is sort of coast agnostic. You're doing a Dahlgren or a Newport with guys going to all corners of the fleet. but the Tycom Indoc gives you an ability to meet with people and get to know the people that you are going to be interacting with on a day-to-day basis as an XO and a CO. But I think something similar to that would be very useful for the COs, you know, probably in the two to three months out timeframe. I mean, you're, you know, but all the ships companies

should be fairly familiar with the SRA package, you know, six, eight months, nine months out, at least, if not more before that. And you have your SRA coordinator assigned probably about a year out. So there's a familiarity there, but I think really understanding the jobs is different than understanding how to successfully execute the SRA. And ship's life cycle, personal turnover, really you want to have the guys that are going to be there for the majority of the SRA really understand what what the ship what the expectations are for shift force uh what the the things that the ship force can control you know particularly the co you know that your co is a it was one of the three between the yard uh the the rmc the regional maintenance center

and the ship like that's kind of your your main players there and the ship co is absolutely if you know a vital part of that because it ultimately it's his responsibility to take the risk of the completed product so you know having somebody that is only there to say look at you know we're not going to shortcut this or you know i'm willing to live with i you know i think it's a prudent decision uh if we're going to defer something but having the you know the the empowerment from the staff from the desron from the the taikon to say you know i just don't i think we've reached a level where this is too much i i felt like i had that i had i had to make that call during my SRA to kind of push a little harder against the RMC and make sure that we did

something in our build and in our engineering spaces that ultimately valued the SRA. But I think it was the right call. And I think ultimately some of the evidence we found once we opened things up proved that it needed to be done. But that was something that happened about five to six months into my SRA. And I felt like at that point, I had learned enough about the process through the process itself that I had the ability to do that. I think in a shorter SRA, sometimes three to four or five months, you're just not getting the runtime to really understand where you need to inject yourself to make sure that things go the right way for the crew. And I think that the TICOM would be better served by having a CO and a crew that is more

empowered and more knowledgeable uh before they go in so they can really act you know they're they're the guys in the deck plates obviously on a day-to-day basis so having the maximum amount of knowledge and focus training on that uh beyond just a safety focus but really like you know what is the what is the you know an rcc where all these sort of contracting you know jargon that gets thrown around by the people that do it on a day-to-day basis you know as a ship's crew come into that you just are you know every i had a you know acronym book that i just kept with me the time because there were just so many things i just did not know because i've never been exposed to them i'd like to thank my guest commander icarus uh where can we find you online and what are you

working on next you got any other writing projects we're going to see from you well i have i have many uh strong opinions about many different things jerry uh i'm i'm intensely familiar thank you yeah exactly um no uh right now i um i'm just back in the pentagon uh after uh my three years to see so um you know the opnet staff is is a bit different than was my left so i'm still trying to um kind of read through all the you know the joint warfare pubs and all the things we've kind of done in the last uh three or four years you know i would say that we've come a long way in the you know change from when i was here last to now to move from a sort of you know near peer competitor to a great power competition um and an acknowledgement throughout the staff so i think

that's a good indication that we're kind of moving in the right direction. I'm anxious to see where the Navy's going to go here as we kind of move to a more innovative, more flexible, more responsive organization that can deal with, you know, the speed of our adversaries and the speed of their development. Well, thanks again for joining us. To listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

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