The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), front, passes the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush (CVN 77) as it departs Norfolk Naval Shipyard. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Steven Edgar)
WEST 2023 — Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has directed the service to draw up a 30-year long-term infrastructure plan in order to get an overarching view of the statuses of the Navy’s installations and facilities.
“Whether it’s a dry dock, whether it’s Red Hill, whether it’s a barracks at Bethesda, we have to stay ahead of the problem. [That] is what [have] we got to do in the Navy, which is why I’m very proud actually of the actions that we took looking at the dry docks in the Puget Sound area,” he told reporters Thursday at the conclusion of the West 2023 conference in San Diego.
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His reference to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard refers to the service’s recent decision to temporarily suspend work at several West Coast-based dry docks following the results of an assessment that indicated the facilities may not be fully prepared to cope with a severe earthquake.
Del Toro denied the recent concerns at Puget Sound were a driving impetus for the new long-term plan. He did not offer any timeline on when the document would be made public or provided to lawmakers.
The new plan is “about identifying what the worst problems are and trying to address those worst problems first, so that they don’t become catastrophic. It’s about trying to minimize risk across the entire spectrum of investments that have to be made,” he said.
The secretary said the new infrastructure plan is different than the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, a 20-year effort to overhaul the Navy’s four public shipyards, because the newer plan will focus on all bases and facilities rather than just the public shipyards.
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Instead, Del Toro compared his new effort with the Navy’s 30-year long-term shipbuilding plan, which is designed to give lawmakers an extended view of the service’s future shipbuilding profile. Congress has been supportive of that document in theory, but in practice the service, under multiple administrations, has repeatedly run afoul of lawmakers by failing to deliver it when it is statutorily required.
The Navy in the fiscal 2023 budget request raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill when it deviated from tradition and presented three unique options for lawmakers to choose from, rather than offer one future shipbuilding profile with which the service had rallied behind.
Despite the unorthodox approach, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told reporters in January that Congress ultimately chose the “bullish” third option, which assumes increased budgets and shipbuilding.
“The Congress has been very bullish on shipbuilding. I think they’ve been very clear in terms of what their expectations are,” he said, citing the overall $4 billion increased funding for shipbuilding over the president’s budget request. “I would put that into alternative three of the shipbuilding plan,” he added.