Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
11/21/2014
As part of an effort to revamp shipyards, which house aging SSBNs and staff a rapidly aging civilian workforce, the Navy plans to update infrastructure at Strategic Weapons Facilities, and to hire approximately 2,450 civilian shipyard and refit facility workers. Hiring will include 100 military and civilian personnel for the Strategic Weapons facilities and Trident Training facilities in Kings Bay, Ga., and Bangor, Wash., according to Defense Department documents released last week as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced a new investment in the nation’s nuclear forces. “We’re finding in the cycle for our submarines, as the submarines get older, our maintenance availabilities tend to trend longer as we put more work into them to get them up to the highest operational level,” said Adm. Michelle Howard, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, during a Nov. 14 press conference at the Pentagon. “So one of the ways we can reduce that maintenance cycle is to hire more people and put more workers on it. So we have been given permission to hire more shipyard workers. We’re doing that hiring now.”
An external report by retired Air Force Gen. Larry Welch and Adm. John Harvey released last week noted the impact that aging SSBNs, alongside funding and manning shortfalls, have on operational forces and the support structure. Those issues cause “unpredictability in a historically predictable pre-deployment, patrol, and refit cycle,” the external report states. “Today, constant adjustments in refit schedules have caused variable patrol lengths, which further compress an already intense off-crew training period, resulting in long working hours in what was previously a ‘decompression’ period between patrols.”
Hagel said on Nov. 14 that DoD would request billions to shore up personnel and infrastructural issues within the U.S. nuclear enterprise, including its naval arm. Howard pointed to aging equipment at naval bases. “The shipyards, the infrastructure and the SSBNs … are continuing to age. I just visited our Strategic Weapons Facility Atlantic last week. Those buildings were built 25 years ago and they’re in good shape. But then when you think about it, it’s like your 25-year-old house. Things start to degrade over time and then you have to invest money to keep them up. And then as things age, you continue to invest more money in maintenance time,” Howard said. “Adding more people costs more money. Having to do more maintenance over the life cycle as things age costs more money.”
Navy Has Launched Reforms
Chaired by Rear Adm. Pete Fanta, commander of Expeditionary Group Five, and Madelyn Creedon, principal deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a classified internal review of the nation’s nuclear forces said that the Navy’s Naval Reactors division plans to replace two training platforms whose lives are expiring and refuel a third training platform, according to an internal review fact sheet. Commissioned by Hagel in February after reports of test cheating within both Naval Reactors and the Air Force’s ICBM force surfaced, both the external review and classified internal review revealed long work hours, impractical promotion test procedures and extraneous weapons inspections within the Navy’s nuclear enterprise.
Shortly after a Manual of the Judge Advocate General (JAGMAN) investigation was released Aug. 20, NS&D Monitor reported that the probe resulted in the expulsion of 34 trainees at the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program in Charleston, S.C., who used email to circulate a file containing past Engineering Watch Supervisor (EWS) exams and answer keys, prior to taking the tests. Completed in March, the JAGMAN investigation found answers for the test, which qualified sailors for advanced watch station duty of nuclear reactors and served as a prerequisite for sailors hoping to earn the rank of chief petty officer, had circulated for at least seven years.
According to a DoD document, the internal review notes several actions the Navy has taken in the wake of the cheating discoveries. Among the reforms is a consolidation of nuclear mission oversight under Director of Strategic Systems Programs Vice Adm. Terry Benedict, the launch of a “Reduce Administrative Distractions” (RAD) program to get sailors’ opinions on how the Navy can propose better solutions to problems and how it can make administrative processes and training more effective. Hagel has also raised hiring caps for naval shipyards, “matching workforce with workload,” the document states.
Undermanning, Double Workloads
The Welch/Harvey external review recommended that the director of Naval Reactors “deliver and maintain” the condition of the engineering watch station prototypes to ensure adequate manning levels at each involved command and to determine the “best balance of effort” to authorize nuclear operators and relieve the “high-pressure situation facing the staff at the prototypes.” Reviewers visiting Charleston’s Nuclear Power Training Unit (NPTU)—which houses submarine ship prototypes for training—had found a tired industrial base. Aging equipment yielded limited usage capacity and commensurate undermanning, with sometimes yearlong backlogs of Nuclear Power School graduates waiting to enter NPTU, the review states. “This delay reduces the value of NPS training and exacerbates the training difficulties in the NPTU phase,” the report said. “To deal with the decline in trainee throughput, the Office of Naval Reactors instituted a policy to allow doubling the student load per instructor during prototype training sessions. None of the instructors—current or past—who met with the Review thought this solution had merit.”
The report also said, “Additionally, because of the increased student load demands, staff workload has increased while training quality has suffered. The staff, made up largely of senior enlisted Sailors, must conduct maintenance on the aging prototypes in addition to training students, while also pursuing their own qualifications necessary to advance.”
Disconnected Testing Procedures
Howard also said the service is hiring additional test instructors. In addition to ensuring adequate resource levels, the external review recommended the Chief of Naval Operations to change “esoteric” testing to a more mission-focused model, while preventing a devolution into a continuous demand for a desired grade point. NPTU sailors told visiting reviewers that qualification tests became increasingly disconnected from and counterproductive to their mission. In an effort to show test auditors that the exams were difficult, officers inserted obscure questions that required memorization of raw facts and checklists that are not “and should not” be performed from memory, according to the external review.
The tests were geared toward attaining a desired grade average and success rate, not operating propulsion plants, the external review states. “The Review heard often that if too many Sailors pass the test, then outside organizations would declare, ‘The examination program was not rigorous as evidenced by high grades and few failures.’ Given this motivation, a consequence of studying hard to do better on tests is more difficult and less relevant tests to meet an arbitrary pass-fail standard. This practice has generated a level of cynicism among dedicated Sailors that is counterproductive to the purpose of testing.”
The cheating was driven partly by a pressure to succeed accompanied by a large time and resource investments by sailors in preparation for the EWS tests. “They move their families and some buy homes in Charleston,” the review states. “They see their professional and personal lives as hinging on success in this qualification, and thus this exam. They routinely work 12-hour days and then spend additional hours studying for the qualification.” Howard said the workload was a factor in the cheating. “Then a factor becomes folks felt it was okay to take a shortcut, even though it was cheating,” Howard said at the press conference. “So then we, as leaders, have to look back and say, ‘Have we set the environment correctly?’ And that’s one of the reasons, in addition to the shipyard workers, we’ll be hiring additional instructors, so that we get the workload balance right, so our sailors continue to exhibit courage, honor, and commitment.”
Excessive Inspections
The external review also calls for a more streamlined inspection process, after reviewers found inspections of ICBM and SLBM bases had become excessive, noting that outside agencies had been inspecting the missile maintenance unit at the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (Bangor) for five consecutive weeks upon reviewers’ arrival. “The missile maintenance activity recorded 100 inspections by agencies outside their activity in the past year,” the review states.
