A SHIPBUILDING LIFELINE

Shipbuilding in Maine was given a reprieve this week when the Pentagon overruled the Navy’s request to award the construction of the next generation of destroyers to a single shipyard. However, the Pentagon’s decision is not final and will be subject to further review. Officials at Bath Iron Works and Maine’s congressional delegation must continue to gather evidence that two shipyards are better than one.

On Wednesday, the Department of Defense turned down the Navy’s request to allow a single shipyard to build the DD(X) destroyer – for now. In a memo, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Michael Wynne wrote that such a strategy was “premature.” However, Secretary Wynne authorized the Navy to seek more industry comment on its proposal to have a single shipyard build the DD(X).

Secretary Wynne is set to retire and the current secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, who supports a one-shipyard strategy, has been nominated to become deputy secretary of defense.

The Navy says it can save $300 million per ship if all the DD(X)s are built at one yard. The first destroyer is expected to cost $3.3 billion. At one time, the Navy envisioned building as many as 30 of the new ships under a competitive system that ensured that both Bath Iron Works and Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Miss., survived. As the cost of the ships has continued to rise due to changes in technology, the Navy now says it may buy as few as five of the destroyers. With so few to be made, the Navy says it makes sense to build the DD(X) at only one shipyard.

A loss of destroyer contracts could lead to the closure of BIW and a major blow to the state’s economy. The Ingalls yard has already won the design competition for the DD(X) and was favored to win the construction contract. However, supporters of the Ingalls yard also dislike the Navy’s winner-take-all strategy. Senators from both Maine and Mississippi have strongly argued that a one-shipyard strategy leaves the Navy vulnerable, whether to a terrorist attack or changing vessel needs.

Once a shipyard is closed or converts to commercial construction, it is very hard to go back to building military ships. Closure of a shipyard would also eliminate a highly specialized work force that could not be easily re-created if the Navy decides to build a lot of new ships in the future.

This is the reason the Navy, in 2001, opposed the merger of the two companies that make its submarines. At that time, the Navy said it needed competition and that it could not end up with a single source for submarines.

If competition is good for submarines, it should be good for surface ships, too.

That’s why Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is attempting to stop a winner-take-all strategy for the DD(X) through legislation attached to the $81 billion request for emergency funding for Iraq and Afghanistan that is currently being debated in Congress. She is also trying to change the way the Navy budgets for shipbuilding to spread the funding over the years it takes to build a ship rather than appropriating the money all at once.

Preserving jobs is important to Maine’s senators, but so is our national defense and military readiness. As Sen. Olympia Snowe said, “One shipyard is simply not enough to preserve the flexibility and capacity necessary to protect our nation.”