BATH – Bath Iron Works, the Navy shipyard once thought to be expendable because of excess shipbuilding capacity, has impressed the Navy by boosting efficiency to the point the highest-ranking officer in the Navy now views Bath as setting the standard for the industry.

Adm. Gary Roughead said he came away from his first visit to the Bath shipyard as chief of naval operations last January with a message that he took back to Washington: “We can’t lose Bath.”

“When you get an organization that is that committed, that is that effective, that efficient, you really have to consider it an American treasure,” Roughead told The Associated Press on Saturday after the christening of the Wayne E. Meyer, a Navy destroyer.

It’s a remarkable change from a decade ago when some top Navy officials felt that it was inefficient and costly to have two shipyards building destroyers.

Back then, Bath Iron Works’ performance was lagging behind its larger competitor, Northrop Grumman’s Ingalls shipyard, on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Some in Navy circles viewed Bath as small and inefficient and not providing anything that Ingalls couldn’t do for less.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, said Navy officials at the time were willing to let Bath Iron Works wither on the vine.

“When I was talking to Navy leaders [back then], they were determined to shut Bath Iron Works,” he said. “They thought Bath was excess capacity.”

Times have changed.

In 2001, Bath Iron Works, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, brought on line its $300 million land-level transfer facility with a goal of modernizing production. Two years later, Bath President Dugan Shipway arrived on the scene and made boosting efficiency one of his goals.

Then came Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which appeared to blow away any further discussion of eliminating one of the shipyards. The hurricane damaged the Ingalls shipyard, underscoring the importance of having another shipyard capable of keeping production moving.

“Katrina was an eye-opener for the Navy,” Thompson said. Not only was the Ingalls shipyard damaged, its work force scattered in the aftermath, he said.

While Ingalls worked to recover, Bath has continued to shine.

In the last five years, the Bath shipyard has reduced the time and cost of building a DDG-51 destroyer by a million labor hours, Shipway told spectators last weekend.

After the christening ceremony, Roughead said he was impressed by the efficiency and faster production of ships, along with the work culture in Bath.

“They really have made some significant strides that I think set the standard for the whole industry,” Roughead said.

There are still some difficult times ahead. Bath Iron Works has been cutting its work force because of reduced demand from the Navy.

The Navy wants to increase its fleet from 282 to 313 ships, but that will take at least another 10 years, Roughead said.

To meet its goal, Roughead is counting on construction of 55 smaller warships designed to operate in shallow water.

At present, there are two competing versions of the littoral combat ship. Bath Iron Works is overseeing construction of one of them at a shipyard in Alabama; the other version, built in Wisconsin, is due to be commissioned next month.

Roughead also wants to stop production of the next-generation stealth destroyer built with heavy artillery to pound onshore targets and continue producing the current line of Arleigh Burke destroyers, like the Wayne E. Meyer.

The strength of the Arleigh Burke class is the versatility of its Aegis weapon system, which can track more than 100 targets at a time. A modified Aegis system was used by a Bath-built cruiser, USS Lake Erie, to shoot down a failed satellite last February.

“The type of threat we’re facing is the proliferation of ballistic missiles, the proliferation of anti-ship missiles, and this ship is ideally suited to take that on,” he said.