Admiral silenced by DOD defends Portsmouth yard

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. – A retired Navy rear admiral who was forbidden by the Department of Defense from testifying about the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard finally got his chance, saying that it shouldn’t be closed unless the Navy is prepared to build three new dry docks somewhere else.

The Department of Defense cited a conflict of interest, claiming that William Klemm, the former deputy commander for logistics, maintenance and industrial operations for Naval Sea Systems Command, was involved in the base-closure process and couldn’t testify.

That angered U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, who said that Klemm’s testimony would have been “devastating to the Navy case, because of his expertise and because of the fact that his points went to all of the criteria” and refuted the Navy’s position.

Klemm was not allowed to testify at the July 6 Base Realignment and Closure Commission hearings in Boston. He ended up testifying on July 19.

“The point is you can have as many people as you want, but you can’t do the work unless you have the dry docks to do the work in,” Klemm was quoted saying in a transcript of his testimony located on the BRAC Web site. “You can surge [move materials and manpower around] or pay overtime as much as you want, but if you don’t have the dry docks, the boats don’t get fixed.”

Klemm described how the Portsmouth base in Kittery, Maine, is the lead shipyard in the improvement of submarine maintenance processes, improvements that are then extended to the Navy’s other three shipyards.

These improvements are, in part, a product of the culture of the work force, he said.

“That culture cannot be exported or replicated, it is imbedded in the generations of people who work at this facility,” Klemm testified. “Therefore, the loss of Portsmouth Naval Shipyard equates to an irreplaceable loss of the culture and skill sets of innovation and efficiency.”

Klemm also said that the Navy’s three remaining shipyards – Norfolk, Va., Puget Sound, Wash., and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, don’t have the capacity nor the resources needed to perform submarine maintenance activities within the prescribed periods of the service lives of the submarines in the fleet.

He said the Navy “will have to keep submarines pier-side in nonoperational status until skilled artisans and dry docks become available or schedule them for inactivation.”

He warned that this will result in a reduction of the size of the submarine fleet “through a backlog of maintenance actions over the next five years.”

The commission will forward its final recommendations on hundreds of military installations nationwide to the president by Sept. 8. The president has until Sept. 23 to accept or reject the recommendations in their entirety.

If accepted, Congress has 45 legislative days to reject the recommendations in their entirety or they become binding.