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  February 7, 2024 | International, Naval

  Supplier bottlenecks threaten US Navy effort to grow arms stockpiles

  The sea service spent billions of dollars to increase its weapons inventory. Now it has run into a major obstacle.

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  September 22, 2020 | International, Naval

  Is the US Navy winning the war on maintenance delays?

  David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy, beset by maintenance delays, is making progress on getting its ships out of the shipyards on time, fleet officials say. Over the past three years, the Navy is on track to more than double the percentage of ships getting out of maintenance on time, key to the service's efforts to make deployments more sustainable for its ships and sailors, Capt. Dave Wroe, U.S. Fleet Forces Command's deputy fleet readiness officer told Defense News in an email. “On-time ship maintenance availability completion rates in private shipyards improved from 24% in FY18 to 37% in FY19,” Wroe said. “Current performance trends in FY20 are projected to be 65%.” The improvement is a sign that the Navy may be turning the corner on a fight to restore readiness from its nadir in the early part of the last decade, when the Navy was running ragged filling unsustainable requirements for forces around the globe. Getting ships through their maintenance cycles on time is the linchpin of what the Navy calls its “optimized fleet response plan,” which is the system through which the Navy generates deployable ships that are maintained, manned and trained. Late last year and again in January, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told audiences that repeated delays in the shipyards was undermining the Navy's Optimized Fleet Response Plan, and turning that around was vital. “We are getting 35 to 40 percent of our ships out of maintenance on time: that's unacceptable,” Gilday said at the USNI Defense Forum in December. “I can't sustain the fleet I have with that kind of track record.” A recent Government Accountability Office report found that between 2015 and 2019, only 25 percent of the Navy's maintenance periods for ships and submarines. Improvements Getting out of that hole has been difficult for a number of reasons: High operational demand for Navy forces makes planning maintenance difficult, and inevitably when the ships go into maintenance after years of hard use, workers discover more work that needs to be done, creating delays. And those delays make executing OFRP difficult, Wroe said. “OFRP provides the construct to best assess and optimize readiness production — down to a unit level — taking into account all the various competing factors to produced Navy readiness,” Wroe said. “Bottom line: OFRP helps mitigate fundamental points of friction, such as shipyard capacity and manning gaps at sea — but in itself doesn't solve key degraders like depot level maintenance delays and extensions.” But some key factors in the delays have been identified and the Navy is working to mitigate them, Fleet Forces Commander Adm. Chris Grady said this week at this week's Fleet Maintenance and Modernization Symposium. One area that has a tendency to drive delays is when workers discover things that need to be fixed, the fix may not cost much but the adjustment must go through an approval process that slows everything down. Those kinds of changes add up to about 70 percent of the so-called “growth work.” Part of it is anticipating and building in ways to deal with growth work into every maintenance period, and the other part is making it easier to address small changes to the scope of the work, Grady said. “When we began this initiative, cycle time for the small value changes averaged about 30 days,” he said “We're now at six and aim to bring it down further to only two days.” Other things that have helped the problem has been bundling maintenance periods for ships, meaning that contractors bid on multiple ships to fix, and can plan hiring further out, Grady said. Additionally, improving base access for contractors has helped, as well. “Last year, we averaged 110 days delayed per ship in private avails,” Grady said, using the short-hand term for “maintenance availability.” “Things much better this year — even with COVID-19,” he continued. “We go from about one-third avails finishing on-time to two-thirds. That is great. But, again, each delay has real impact on our readiness, and we need to keep working together to do better.” What happened? Because the U.S. Navy is set up to meet standing presence requirements and missions around the world, it must cycle its ships through a system of tiered readiness. That means ships go on deployment fully manned, trained and equipped. Then the ships come home, and after a period of sustained readiness where the ship can be redeployed, it goes into a reduced readiness status while undergoing maintenance. Following maintenance, the ship and crew goes into a training cycle for another deployment as an individual unit, then as a group, then returns to deployment. The whole cycle takes 36 months: Rinse and repeat. OFRP was designed in the 2013-2014 time-frame when the Navy was deploying well beyond its means, with carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups going out for nine-to-10 months at a time. The excess use wore hard on the ships and sailors who manned them and put more wear on the hulls than they were designed to sustain. That meant that when ships went in for maintenance they were more broken than they were supposed to be, and funding to fix them was hampered by spending cuts. For nuclear ships — submarines and aircraft carriers — the funding cuts were a double whammy of work stoppages and furloughs that contributed to a wave of retirements in the yards, meaning the public yards were understaffed and had to hire and train new workers. Work took longer, throwing a wrench into an already complicated system of generating readiness. All that added up to significant delays in getting ships through their maintenance cycles and contributed to astonishing delays in attack submarine maintenance especially. What OFRP was meant to do was create a system whereby the Navy could meet combatant commander demands but not break the system. That meant that the Navy would generate as much readiness as it possibly could but that the demand would have to be limited to what the Navy could reasonably maintain, man, train and equip. But getting to that system has been immensely difficult because of the deep hole the Navy dug meeting requirements that well outstripped funding and supply. For example, there was a two year period when the service was forced to supply two carrier strike groups to the Arabian Gulf at all times, a requirement only canceled when automatic across-the-board spending cuts in 2013 made it impossible for the Navy to fund the two-carrier requirement. Adding to the difficulty: some of OFRP's founding requirements were nigh impossible to pull off. One was that the all the ships in group would go into and come out of their maintenance availabilities on time and together. Another was that a group would go into the first phase of their training, the so-called basic phase right after coming out of maintenance, fully manned. Both have been immensely difficult to pull off. But Fleet Forces, headed then by OFRP architect Adm. Phil Davidson, was given ample warning that those assumptions would be difficult to achieve. Then-NAVSEA head Vice Adm. William Hilarides told USNI News in January 2015 that getting ships to come out of the yards simultaneously would be hard. “The challenge to me is, let's say you want four destroyers in a battle group, all to come out at the same time in one port? That's a real challenge,” Hilarides told USNI News. The current head of NAVSEA, who at the time was in charge of the Regional Maintenance Center enterprise, backed up his boss to USNI News, saying it would be particularly challenging in places with less infrastructure. “Your big rub there is, the challenge of OFRP is ... all those ships [in a carrier strike group], they go through maintenance together, they go through training together and they deploy together,” said then-Rear Adm. William Galinis. "So, what our challenge is, is to be able to take all that work from all those ships and try to schedule it for roughly about the same time, and to get all that work done on time. So that's our challenge. “Now, in a port like Norfolk or San Diego, we have big shipyards, a lot of people, a lot of ships. You can kind of absorb that type of workload. When you go to Mayport, they've got like 10 ships down there [and typically cannot work on more than one or two destroyers at a time.],” he told USNI. Galinis said that Fleet Forces would have to be responsive to the shipyards because at least that way they could plan for delays. “They know if they give us all this work at one time, it's going to go long anyway,” he told USNI. “So they'd rather be able to plan that and at least know when they're getting the ship back, as opposed to, ‘nope, we're not going to talk to you, you've got to go do it,' and then the ships go long because we don't have enough people to do the work.” Fleet Forces Command has been reviewing its assumptions this year and is preparing to release a revised OFRP instruction, but the core is likely to remain the same. In any case, Wroe said in the email, it was always going to take a long time to dig out of the hole the Navy found itself in when OFRP was implemented fully in 2015. “It was clear at the inception of OFRP, and remains clear today, that it will take the entire 2015-2025 period to recover readiness and establish stable readiness production,” Wroe said. “That makes sense when readiness production is planned over 9-years and large blocks of time have already been scheduled for depot maintenance periods.” Ultimately, if the process of OFRP is funded correctly and ships can get out of maintenance on time, it's a sound way of moving forward, Fleet Forces Commander Grady told the audience this week. “My bottom line here is that, as a process, OFRP works,” he said. “If we are looking where to improve upon it, each of these studies came to the same conclusion: the biggest inhibitor to fleet readiness is maintenance and modernization performance in the shipyards. We simply must get better, and I know you share my concern.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/09/19/is-the-us-navy-winning-the-war-on-maintenance/

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  March 26, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security, Other Defence

  Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - March 25, 2019

  NAVY Gartner Inc., Stamford, Connecticut (N66001-19-A-0049); Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts (N66001-19-A-0050); and FEDmine LLC, Rockville, Maryland (N66001-19-A-0013), are awarded a multiple-award, firm-fixed-price Department of Defense (DoD) Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI) blanket purchase agreement (BPA) in accordance with the firms' General Services Administration (GSA) Federal Supply Schedule contracts. The overall estimated value of this BPA is $446,000,000. The three individual agreements are awarded in the DoD ESI category of Information Technology (IT) Research and Informative Services. The BPAs will provide commercially available technology in this category for the DoD, U.S. intelligence community, and Coast Guard activities worldwide. The ordering period will be for a maximum of 10 years, and the expected date of completion is March 24, 2029. This BPA is issued under DoD ESI in accordance with the policy and guidelines in the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, Section 208.74. This BPA will not obligate funds at the time of award. Funds will be obligated as task orders using operations and maintenance (DoD) funds. Requirements will be competed among the awardees in accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulation 8.403-3(c)(2), and the successful contractor will receive firm-fixed-price orders. This BPA was competitively procured via the GSA E-Buy website among 679 vendors. Three offers were received and three were selected for award. Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, San Diego, California, is the contracting activity. Austal USA, Mobile, Alabama, is being awarded a $261,776,539 fixed-price-incentive (firm target) modification to previously-awarded contract N00024-19-C-2227 for the detail design and construction (DD&C) of the 13th and 14th Expeditionary Fast Transport (EPF) ships, and to definitize the long-lead-time material undefinitized contract actions for EPFs 13 and 14. This modification will award the DD&C effort for EPF 13 and EPF 14 and definitize and subsume the long-lead-time material undefinitized contract actions for EPFs 13 and 14. Note: the funding obligated covers the DD&C award and also definitizes the UCAs -- which results in a total greater than the face value of the award. The EPF class provides high-speed, shallow-draft transportation capability to support the intra-theater maneuver of personnel, supplies and equipment for the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Army. This contract includes options which, if exercised, would bring the cumulative value of this contract to $370,733,399. Work will be performed in Mobile, Alabama (54 percent); Novi, Michigan (13 percent); Fairfax, Virginia (7 percent); Houston, Texas (4 percent); Franklin, Massachusetts (3 percent); New Iberia, Louisiana (3 percent); Kingsford, Michigan (2 percent); Chesapeake, Virginia (2 percent); and Theodore, Alabama (1 percent), with other efforts performed at various locations throughout the United States below one percent (7 percent) and at various locations outside the U.S. below one percent (4 percent). Work is expected to completed by July 2022. Fiscal 2018 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy) funding in the amount of $134,609,225; and fiscal 2019 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy) funding in the amount of $161,815,453 will be obligated at time of award and will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was competitively solicited via the Federal Business Opportunities website, with one offer received. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, District of Columbia, is the contracting activity. Professional Contract Services Inc., Austin, Texas, is being awarded a $26,684,510 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract modification for the exercise of Option Number Four for base operations support services at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, Virginia, and its outlying support sites all located in Virginia. The work to be performed provides for all labor, supervision, management, tools, materials, equipment, facilities, transportation, incidental engineering, and other items necessary to provide facilities maintenance and equipment repair services in support of Naval Medical Center Portsmouth and its outlying support sites. After award of this option, the total cumulative contract value will be $120,671,131. Work will be performed in Portsmouth, Virginia. This option period is from April 2019 to March 2020. No funds will be obligated at time of award. Fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance, (Navy) contract funds in the amount of $24,334,266 for recurring work will be obligated on individual task orders issued during the option period. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Mid-Atlantic, Norfolk, Virginia, is the contracting activity (N62470-15-D-4009). Insitu Inc., Bingen, Washington, is being awarded a $17,452,196 firm-fixed-price delivery order (N6833519F0434) against a previously issued basic ordering agreement (N68335-16-G-0046). This order provides for technical services, training, site survey and activation teams, and program management to sustain and support ScanEagle unmanned aerial vehicle sites in Afghanistan. Work will be performed in Afghanistan (95 percent); and Bingen, Washington (5 percent), and is expected to be completed in March 2020. Fiscal 2019 Afghan Security Forces funds in the amount of $17,452,196 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, Lakehurst, New Jersey, is the contracting activity. Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., Annapolis, Maryland, is being awarded a $10,242,891 firm-fixed-price and cost-plus-fixed-fee modification to a previously awarded contract (N61331-15-D-0011) to exercise options for the accomplishment of depot level repair, maintenance, and modifications of the AN/AQS-24 Mine Detecting System to support the Navy for the currently deployed airborne mine countermeasures legacy systems. Northrop Grumman Undersea Systems will provide depot repairs and incorporation of engineering change proposals, including the updates of all integrated logistics support documentation to support the conversions and sustainment. Work will be performed in Annapolis, Maryland, and is expected to be completed by April 2020. No funding will be obligated at time of award. Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City Division, Panama City, Florida is the contracting activity. ARMY Acrow Corp. of America,* Parsippany, New Jersey (W56HZV-19-D-0061); and Mabey Bridge Ltd., Gloucestershire, United Kingdom (W56HZV-19-D-0062), will compete for each order of the $250,000,000 firm-fixed-price contract for wet and dry gap line of communication bridges. Bids were solicited via the internet with two received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of March 25, 2022. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Warren, Michigan, is the contracting activity. Avon Protection Systems Inc., Cadillac, Michigan, was awarded a $245,961,250 firm-fixed-price contract for production of M53A1 Chemical Biological Protective Mask systems. One bid was solicited with one bid received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of March 24, 2024. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is the contracting activity (W911SR-19-D-0005). South Carolina Commission for the Blind, Columbia, South Carolina, was awarded an $186,580,917 firm-fixed-price contract for full food services at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Bids were solicited via the internet with seven received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of March 21, 2024. U.S. Army Mission and Installation Contracting Command, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, is the contracting activity (W9124J-19-D-0008). American Ordnance LLC, Middletown, Iowa, was awarded an $89,418,245 modification (P00022) to contract W15QKN-15-C-0044 for the acquisition of M918E1 40mm High Velocity Target Practice – Day/Night/Thermal (HV TP-DNT) – cartridge. Work will be performed in Middletown, Iowa; Coachella, California; Radford, Virginia; Santa Margarita, California; O'Fallon, Missouri; Lynchburg, Virginia; Mountainside, New Jersey; and St. Bonaparte, Iowa, with an estimated completion date of Nov. 30, 2021. Fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 other procurement, Army funds in the amount of $89,418,245 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Contracting Command, New Jersey, is the contracting activity. Alta Via Consulting LLC,* Loudon, Tennessee, was awarded a $22,000,000 firm-fixed-price contract for cost management services. Bids were solicited via the internet with one received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of March 28, 2024. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is the contracting activity (W91CRB-19-D-0018). Advance Technology Solutions,* Augusta, Georgia, was awarded a $14,530,927 firm-fixed-price contract for services in the areas of military personnel actions, records processing and management, personnel manning, casualty management, transition and separations processing, personnel information systems management, and administrative processing of soldiers. Bids were solicited via the internet with 12 received. Work will be performed in Fort Gordon, Georgia, with an estimated completion date of May 1, 2025. Fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance, Army funds in the amount of $1,355,849 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Mission and Installation Contracting Command, Fort Gordon, Georgia, is the contracting activity (W91249-18-C-0005). DEFENSE LOGISTICS AGENCY General Dynamics Mission Systems Inc., Taunton, Massachusetts, has been awarded a maximum $92,900,000 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical Increment 1 system. This was a sole-source acquisition using justification 10 U.S. Code 2304 (c)(1), as stated in Federal Acquisition Regulation 6.302-1. This is a five-year contract with no option periods. Location of performance is Massachusetts, with a March 24, 2024, performance completion date. Using military service is Army. Type of appropriation is fiscal 2019 through 2024 Army working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Land and Maritime, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland (SPRBL1-19-D-0027). SZY Holdings, doing business as EverReady First Aid, Brooklyn, New York, has been awarded a maximum $25,000,000 firm-fixed-price with economic-price-adjustment, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for respirators, mask face pieces and cartridges replacement parts. This was a competitive acquisition with six responses received. This is a one-year base contract with four one-year option periods. Location of performance is New York, with a March 25, 2020, performance completion date. Using customer is Navy. Type of appropriation is fiscal 2019 through 2020 defense working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (SPE8EG-19-D0104). Parker Hannifin Corp., Irvine, California, has been awarded a $7,979,568 modification (P00185) to a five-year contract (SPE4AX-14-D-9413) with one five-year option period adding national stock numbers supporting multiple aircrafts. This was a sole-source acquisition using justification 10 U.S. Code 2304 (c)(1), as stated in Federal Acquisition Regulation 6.302-1. This is a firm-fixed-price contract. The modification brings the total cumulative face value of the contract to $441,414,547 from $433,434,979. Locations of performance are California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York and Ohio, with a June 30, 2024, performance completion date. Using military service is Navy. Type of appropriation is fiscal 2019 through 2024 defense working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Aviation, Richmond, Virginia. AIR FORCE National Aerospace Solutions LLC, Arnold Air Force Base, Tennessee, has been awarded a $72,894,364 modification (P00071) to previously awarded contract FA9101-15-C-0500 for test operations and sustainment. This modification provides for test operations, technology development, equipment and facility sustainment, capital improvements and some support services for Arnold Engineering Development Complex. Work will be performed at Arnold AFB, Tennessee, and is expected to be completed by June 30, 2019. No funds are being obligated at the time of award. This modification brings the total cumulative face value of the contract to $722,733,576. Air Force Test Center, Arnold AFB, Tennessee, is the contracting activity. DEFENSE HEALTH AGENCY General Dynamics Information Technology Inc., Fairfax, Virginia (HT0014-19-C-0004), has been awarded a $44,165,348 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to provide support to the Defense Health Agency's Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (DVBIC). The work includes support promoting access to state-of-the-science care for service members, veterans, and their families to prevent and mitigate the consequences of traumatic brain injury (TBI). DVBIC supports a network of 21 sites operating out of 16 military treatment facilities (MTFs) and five Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMCs). Specific activities vary at each site and can include conducting clinical research and conducting education and outreach activities and assessing TBI injury data, while command and control exist within the DVBIC Headquarters for continuity of services. The contract will be performed at DVBIC HQ, Silver Spring, Maryland; MTFs at Fort Belvoir, Virginia; Fort Bliss, Texas; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Campbell, Kentucky; Fort Carson, Colorado; Fort Drum, New York; Fort Hood, Texas; Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; Camp Pendleton, California; Naval Medical Center San Diego, California; Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Maryland; San Antonio Military Medical Center, Texas; U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida; Landstuhl (Germany); Joint Bases Lewis-McChord, Washington, and Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska; and VAMCs in Palo Alto, California; Tampa, Florida; Minneapolis, Minnesota; San Antonio, Texas; and Richmond, Virginia. The contract end date is Sept. 25, 2020. This contract includes a six-month base period with four three-month option periods. Fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance funds in the amount of $14,336,163 are obligated on this award. This was a sole-source acquisition. The Defense Health Agency, Falls Church, Virginia, is the contracting activity. *Small business https://dod.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract-View/Article/1794949/