U.S. NAVY
The guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie enters dry dock
at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard Sept. 14 for a three-month maintenance availability.
RMC embedded in the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard
and Intermediate Maintenance Facility.
“In Northwest and Pearl, where the bigger base of
their work is in the nuclear world and the [surface
ship] component of the work in those ports is very
small, the decision was made not to stand up separate
flagpoles for the RMCs, but to keep the surface ship
piece aligned to the public shipyard,” Gale said. “It’s an
efficiency, and it’s the way we need to do it. I have no
thirst, nor did anybody else have the thirst, to try to
justify standing up new flagpoles in ports where, in
Pearl, you have 11 ships and, in Puget, you have five.”
Only the ship repair activity in Yokosuka, Japan,
remains fleet owned and operated, because of its forward-deployed nature, but still coordinates its operations with
CNRMC.
The RMCs and similar activities still are funded by
the fleets, and CNRMC has no ship repair and modernization budget of its own. Gale estimates the volume of
business that the fleets fund through CNRMC to be
approximately $2 billion per year. He supervises a work
force of more than 3,300 government civilians, military
personnel and contractors who conduct approximately
500 maintenance availabilities each year.
CNRMC is a single point of leadership and management for all aspects of ship repair and modernization,
including administration, engineering, operations,
contract management and governance, and financial
management. An executive director and a chief of staff
drive day-to-day operations, with maintenance directors for the East and West Coasts.
Gale said he created the maintenance director billets
and “made strategic hires into those billets to actually
have these people sit on the type commander’s
[TYCOM’s] staff [Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific
Fleet, and Naval Surface Force, Atlantic] so that
CNRMC is a permanent piece every day of what’s going
on inside the TYCOM staff, and to always be checking
our blind spot for anything that’s on the type commander’s mind, any issue that comes up that needs a quick
turnaround. In the past, the [TYCOM’s] maintenance
shop had to go to independent RMCs individually to
get those things done.
“In the larger sense, CNRMC is part of a much larger
engagement right now by Navy leadership to improve
the way we plan for and execute surface ship maintenance,” Gale said.
“We’ve got 160-plus ships to take care of out there
on the waterfront around the world so there’s a lot of
emphasis on modernization,” Henney said. “The new
[chief of naval operations, Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert]
mentioned that readiness and getting ships to their
expected service life is critically important.”
After the FRP report was issued, McCoy charged his
subordinate commanders to look at how the nuclear-
powered aircraft carrier and submarine communities
were addressing maintenance and determine what gaps
existed in the surface fleet.
One process adopted from the submarine community
is the Total Ship Readiness Assessment, involving reliably measuring a ship’s condition and tailoring a work
package for repair, maintenance and modernization.
Another concept adopted from the nuclear-powered
fleet is integrated product team development (IPTD).
“IPTD is right out of the carrier and submarine play-
book,” Gale said. “It’s how they do business as they pre-
pare for every one of their [ship maintenance] availabil-
ities. Where they largely work hard to define their suc-
cess and then deliver a planning process, today, the sur-
face navy does very little of that. And, so, we’re turning
that around and I’m fully resourced to implement pro-
ject team development efforts across all surface navy
availabilities. By the end of [fiscal] ’ 12, if not calendar
year ’ 12, we will have IPTD laid in for every availability
that comes after that.”
“The establishment of CNRMC has aligned the
RMCs, emphasizing standardization, sharing of infor-
mation, metric achievements and training requirements
which all support improved RMC performance,” said
Cmdr. Kate Dolloff, surface ship operations officer at the
Pearl Harbor yard and facility.
