John F. Schank

To prepare for its next Defence White Paper, Australia is examining an enterprise-level naval shipbuilding plan. To support this effort, RAND researchers explore the feasibility of Australia sustaining a domestic naval shipbuilding industry compared with buying ships from foreign shipbuilders. The authors outline the complex consequences and trade-offs of both options.

This volume presents a set of lessons learned from Australia's Collins submarine program that could help inform future program managers. Collins was the first submarine built in Australia. RAND investigated how operational requirements were set for the Collins class; explored the acquisition, contracting, design, and build processes that the program employed; and assessed the activities surrounding integrated logistics support for the class.

The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia asked the RAND Corporation to develop a set of lessons learned from previous submarine programs that could help inform future program managers. This volume presents an overview of five submarine programs in the three countries - the UK's Astute program; the U.S. Navy's Ohio, Seawolf, and Virginia programs; and Australia's Collins program - and identifies lessons that apply to all of them.

This volume presents a set of lessons learned from the United Kingdom's Astute submarine program that could help inform future program managers. Designing and building a submarine requires careful management and oversight and a delegation of roles and responsibilities that recognizes which party - the shipbuilder or the government - is best positioned to manage risks.

The U.S. Navy asked the RAND Corporation to develop a set of lessons learned from previous submarine programs that could help inform future program managers. This volume presents lessons from three U.S. submarine programs. The RAND team looked at how the programs were managed, the issues that affected management decisions, and the outcomes of those decisions. An overarching lesson from the three programs is the importance of program stability. One-liner: This volume presents an overview of lessons learned from three U.S. Navy submarine programs that could help inform future program managers.

The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence (MOD) moved from a position of significant authority and responsibility in submarine design and development to one in which its acquisition responsibilities were largely transferred to a prime contractor. Now it is trying to re-engage. This book recommends measures and structures the UK Ministry of Defence can adopt to better manage its risks and responsibilities in the acquisition of nuclear submarines.

This study provides a program overview of acquisition options available for the Commonwealth of Australia s next generation naval surface combatant and identifies internal and external factors that can influence a major ship acquisition program. The authors address questions relating to available ship design and build options; various phases, options, and decisions; and aspects that can contribute to the success of an acquisition program."

Some recent shipbuilding programs in the United States and Europe have involved multiple shipyards constructing major modules of each ship for final integration and testing at one shipyard. The Navy needs to decide what it wants from a shared-build strategy, then monitor and manage the program to ensure that it delivers the required outcome, as well as the vessels called for in the program.

C4I systems have evolved rapidly over the last few decades, and the cost of keeping these products up-to-date on new and in-service U.S. Navy ships is high due to configuration, integration, testing, and other challenges. Looking across a specific set of completed C4I upgrades, the authors found evidence of cost improvement, a high level of variability in costs, and a trend toward overestimating the installation-labor costs of certain upgrades.

RAND investigated cost-effective workforce-management strategies, alternative workload allocations, and the relevant best practices of comparable organizations to assist the Navy in managing the public shipyards. The Navy uses many practices common in other organizations, but reducing planned levels of overtime and increasing the permanent journeyman staff at the public shipyards could cost-effectively hedge against future workload growth.

Building on prior RAND research, this monograph explores the need for and retention of technical skills in the UK's maritime industry, particularly among designers and engineers involved with surface ship and submarine acquisition and support. The results reveal that the UK's future naval programme likely will have to be modified or augmented to sustain these technical skills in the long term.

The more accurately a cost index captures a shipbuilder's risk, the less the Navy should have to pay its shipbuilders. The Navy uses such indexes to correct for significant cost risks outside its shipbuilders' control. A longtime material-cost index in Navy shipbuilding is the steel-vessel index, but it is outdated and volatile. The authors urge the Navy to develop a modern-vessel index that more appropriately represents the materials used today.

The U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier fleet must meet the forward presence requirements of theater commanders. With a decreasing fleet size, planners must balance the timing of maintenance, training, and deployment with presence and surge demands. Evaluating multiple one- and two-deployment scenarios per cycle, RAND examines the feasibility of different cycle lengths, their effect on carrier forward presence, and their impact on shipyard workloads.

The Fleet Response Plan is a U.S. Navy program to enhance the operational availability of the aircraft carrier fleet. This report describes program modeling that varies the time between depot availabilities and the size of the depot work packages, to estimate its effect on the maintenance industrial base and the operational availability of the aircraft carrier fleet.

Nuclear submarine design resources at the shipyards, their suppliers, and the Navy may erode for lack of demand. Analysis of alternative workforce and workload management options suggests that the U.S. Navy should stretch out the design of the next submarine class and start it early or sustain design resources above the current demand, so that the next class may be designed on time, on budget, and with low risk.

To achieve a more responsive and more readily deployable fleet of surface combatants, the Navy adopted the Fleet Response Plan (FRP) in 2003 to replace its traditional two-year ship maintenance cycle. The authors of this report look at the effects the FRP has had thus far and determine whether maintenance resources are meeting maintenance demands and whether related industry resources have been coordinated effectively.

RAND was assigned to assess alternative acquisition strategies for the Navy's new family of destroyers. The authors drew on the history of competition in acquisition programs to examine a rich array of options. They concluded that for the program that existed in 2003 competition among primes would be impractical, that splitting the work should sustain the industrial base, and that a mixed strategy using different contract forms would work best.

Advises how the United Kingdom should best use modern outsourcing and outfitting practices for shipbuilding in the years to come. The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence (MOD) is preparing for the construction of the Royal Navy's two new Future Aircraft Carriers (CVFs), slated to enter service in 2012 and 2015, respectively. The CVFs will be the largest warships built in the United Kingdom in decades. At the request of the MOD, the RAND Corporation looked at the risks of current contractor plans and estimated the cost implications of using alternative manufacturing options in the coming years.

Explores acceleration of the pace at which the U.S. Coast Guard can acquire surface and air assets that it will operate in the deepwater environment (50 or more nautical miles from shore) and whether the original Integrated Deepwater System program to modernize its aging cutters and aircraft will provide the Coast Guard with a force structure to meet the demands of its traditional missions and emerging responsibilities. 450-character abstract: Explores whether the pace at which the U.S. Coast Guard can acquire surface and air assets that it will operate in the deepwater environment (50 or more nautical miles from shore) can be accelerated and whether the original Integrated Deepwater System program to modernize its aging ships and aircraft will provide the Coast Guard with a force structure to meet the demands of its traditional missions and emerging responsibilities as part of the new Department of Homeland Security.