Michael E McMahon

This report is an exploration of possible alternatives for further consideration to potentially replace the U.S. Navy's legacy aircraft carrier force as it begins reaching expected service life in decades to come. The variants are possible alternatives that could be developed for less cost than the current program and potentially with sufficient capability. This is neither a formal analysis of alternatives nor a detailed engineering study.

The U.S. Navy's ship inventory and the shipbuilding and repair industrial base that supports these ships have experienced significant changes. In the next 30 years, additional significant changes to the fleet composition and the maintenance requirements of the fleet are likely. This report assesses possible supply and demand capabilities in the ship maintenance workload for the Navy and notes long-term challenges facing mitigation efforts.

To better understand why the rising number of civilians employed at the U.S. Navy's public shipyards has outpaced increases in workload, RAND researchers explore how shipyard work is changing, whether more personnel are now required to perform it, and what risks shipyards may wish to address through additional hiring.

Through analysis of alternative courses of action and their effects on probability distributions estimated for performance, schedule, and cost, acquisition decisionmakers can understand the implications of certain risk-mitigating actions. They can examine technology, schedule, and cost trades between or within individual systems.