Gale focused on restoring the I-
level maintenance capability and
capacity in the RMCs that a decade
ago was resident in the Ship Inter-
mediate Maintenance Activities
(IMAs), where the fleet had made a
“major divestiture.” He is working to
increase the capacity of the RMCs
and “restore the journeyman-level
training component of what IMAs
used to do for every Sailor.”
“The idea being that when Sailors
come off ships [they] have a shore
billet to rotate into that actually
gives them some journeyman skill
training in their [hull, mechanical
and electrical] ratings as opposed to
going and handing out basketballs
or becoming a duty driver for some-
one,” Henney said. “They come
back out to the ships better trained
and able to help to train the Sailors
on the ship.”
“Beefing up the capabilities of
the I-level will expand areas of work
that we were previously not
manned to execute, saving mainte-
nance dollars as well as providing
shore billets to keep technicians
trained in accomplishing critical
ship maintenance,” Dolloff said.
“In Pearl Harbor, [the RMC] has enabled the routine
accomplishment of shipyard-level maintenance actions
during intermediate maintenance availabilities and has
improved overall efficiencies,” said Cmdr. Jeffrey T.
Heydon, assistant operations officer at Pearl Harbor.
That increased I-level maintenance capability “
supports the high operational tempo of the ships homeported
in Pearl Harbor,” said Capt. Lynn Hampton, deputy commander, Hawaii Regional Maintenance Center.
Gale also is reversing some of the civilian work force
reductions that negatively affected technical engineering expertise available to assist the fleet, and is beefing
up his contract administration force.
“Well over 90 percent of all the surface ship mainte-
nance and modernization is done in the private sector,
so everything we do in the private sector, naturally, is
a contract action,” he said. “We lost some capability in
that area, too, to do that more reliably and efficiently.
There are bodies coming back to that.”
CNRMC also is focusing on work force development.
“There has never been a rolled-up, consolidated, consistent training requirement or execution of training
requirements across the RMCs,” Gale said. “No two skills
were trained to the same curriculum
or qualified to the same standard to
perform like work. We are embarked
on a very comprehensive review of
the training requirement and we’re
going to roll out identical training,
consistent training, to all the RMCs
for all the skills and get everybody
trained and qualified to the same
standard.”
Another advantage of training
standards is the ability to move
workers between RMCs as the
workload demand shifts, much as is
done between naval shipyards and
private shipbuilders, Gale said.
“Sharing of personnel across the
corporation, particularly shipbuilding specialists and contract
specialists, has proven invaluable
to the Hawaii RMC in executing
four major availabilities simultaneously,” Dolloff said.
CNRMC outsources much of its
work to contractors, especially
work in the structures and corrosion assessments. The command
also is continuing the use of Multi-Ship Multi-Option (MSMO) contracts with shipyards, normally for
a series of availabilities with certain classes of ships.
“For instance, BAE Systems in San Diego was awarded
the contract, if all the options are exercised, for 32 DDGs
[guided-missile destroyers],” Henney said. “Because
they’ve also got the DDG contract out on the East Coast,
there are some efficiencies that can be gained, stabilization
of the work force and learning curve efficiencies that you
might achieve through having an entire class to execute.”
“The MSMO strategy is going to continue to evolve, but
we’re largely very happy with what it’s done for us,” Gale
said. “Like anything, something as complex as 19 different
contracts with six different primes and five different ports
and five different RMCs executing it, there are a lot of
complexities that we really are focused on to standardize.
“The challenge today is to get the right group of folks
who both work for me or work around me to align
themselves to a single-minded position that we are
changing surface navy maintenance and we’re doing it
together,” he said. “There’s a challenge in getting to a
unity of effort and then how do you maintain it once
you get it? You’re going to get what you want for as long
as you keep heat and light on it, but unless you’ve done
all the right things to make it permanent or enduring,
you can quickly walk away from it.” ;
U.S. NAVY
Dave Francis, left, Norfolk, Va., Ship
Support Activity (NSSA) engineering
technician and member of the Deck
Maintenance Assist Team, and Interior
Communications Electrician 3rd Class
Sarah Rios work to repair a sliding
padeye aboard the guided-missile
destroyer USS Mitscher May 5, when
the facility still was known as Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center.
NSSA was established in October.
