TITLE: Why has the Navy spent at least $175M on an old ship that may never return to sea?
EXCERPT: Each year, the Navy sends Congress a list of ships that officials want to decommission or retire. In March, the Navy submitted to Congress a list of 11 ships it sought to retire, including the Vicksburg.
It wasn't the first time the Vicksburg appeared on the list. But it hasn't been decommissioned because of opposition from lawmakers.
Members of Congress often object to a ship's retirement because the repair work means jobs at shipyards in their district. Others oppose the decommissioning of a ship for another reason: They want the Navy to maintain a high number of ships in its fleet regardless of their condition in order to deter China.
The Navy currently has a goal of 355 ships but has maintained a fleet of 270 to 300 battle force ships since 2003, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Most of the ships on this year’s retirement list, like the Vicksburg, are more than 30 years old. But two of the ships are just seven years old and part of the troubled Littoral Combat ship class that has been sharply criticized by watchdogs for wasteful spending.
The USS Vicksburg was first launched in 1991.
While the Navy has spent at least $175 million on its contract with BAE Systems, which operates the Norfolk shipyard, to modernize and repair the Vicksburg, the total cost of maintenance is likely much more.
At a House Appropriations Committee hearing last year, Chairwoman Kay Granger, R-Texas, said that the Navy had awarded $500 million in contracts to update the Vicksburg. The Navy says that total cost includes “various availabilities, material procurements, and advanced instillations,” but it declined to say how much of the $500 million has been spent to date.
TITLE: America's Military Can’t Repair Its Own $1.7 Trillion Jet
EXCERPT: The F-35 is a troubled aircraft that’s been on the GAO’s radar for years. Its new report on the jet, “DOD and the Military Services Need to Reassess the Future Sustainment Strategy,” drilled down into why the aircraft spent so much time on the tarmac and not in the skies. “The F-35 fleet mission capable rate—the percentage of time the aircraft can perform one of its tasked missions—was about 55 percent in March 2023, far below program goals,” the GAO said. “The program was behind schedule in establishing depot maintenance activities to conduct repairs. As a result, component repair times remained slow with over 10,000 waiting to be repaired.”
Right now, the care and upkeep of F-35s has been contracted out to third parties. If something breaks on an F-35, it’s usually fixed by a defense contractor and not military engineers. This is part of why the jet is so expensive. “DOD has estimated overall costs for the program at more than $1.7 trillion over its life cycle, with the majority of the costs, about $1.3 trillion, associated with sustaining the aircraft,” the GAO said.
The goal has long been for the Pentagon to take over routine maintenance of the aircraft, but it’s not going well. When something breaks on the F-35, it takes the Pentagon an average of 141 days to repair it. That’s a long time for a jet to be grounded, but it's actually an improvement from the last time the GAO conducted the survey in 2017. Back then it took the DoD 172 days to fix a piece of the jet. The goal is to get that number down to 60. “Program officials anticipated having greater repair material starting in the second half of 2023, helping to steadily improve repair times,” the GAO said. “These officials also told us that they were still years away from achieving the program’s goal.”
Other indicators have gotten worse, not better. In 2019, there was a backlog of 4,300 parts waiting on repair. In 2023, that number is up to 10,000, but the GAO did say that some of this is due to an increased number of F-35s overall. The problem of waiting on repair parts has gotten so bad, however, that the DoD is simply buying new parts instead of waiting to repair old ones.
TITLE: ‘Potentially hazardous’: AH-64E Apache generator failures causing ‘breathing and visibility issues’
EXCERPT: “Over the last year, the Apache has experienced an increase in the instance of electrical power generator failures resulting in potentially hazardous flight conditions and precautionary landings,” the report said. “As a result, the [program manager] has instituted a multi-faceted approach to reduce both the instance and severity of generator failures.”
A Program Executive Office Aviation spokesman explained in a Tuesday email that when the generator fails, the Apache cockpit can fill with smoke causing “breathing and visibility issues.”
However, those electric issues have not resulted in a crash or prompted enough concern for service leaders to ground the fleet, he added.
“A long-term solution is under investigation,” the spokesman wrote in an email. “Engineering effort will commence once the program is funded.”
In the meantime, the Army has taken several “interim actions” to address the generator failures including retrofitting the helo fleet with a modification that shuts down a compromised generator as soon as a fault is detected, the spokesman wrote.
Boeing, the Apache prime contractor, did not immediately respond to Breaking Defense’s questions about the generator failure. Regardless of the existing problem, the US government is continuing to approve AH-64E sales abroad, including a recent one with Poland for 96 aircraft.
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TITLE: US Army Finally Fields IVAS Goggles After Years of Delay
EXCERPT: “Anybody who has had IVAS on, even the early versions, knows that this is a transformative capability and really has the potential to change the way that we fight,” program manager Col. Anthony Gibbs said.
“This new version, 1.2, we think it’s really going to hit the mark in terms of what we need to put out there for our Soldiers to give them the situational awareness and the leap-ahead capability they need to stay ahead of our peers.”
The development and fielding of IVAS goggles faced years of delay after soldiers complained of disorientation, dizziness, eyestrain, and headaches after trying the equipment.
They also reportedly hit fewer targets and engaged more slowly when they used the IVAS 1.0.
Another technical issue discovered on the goggles involved their “field of view.” The equipment allegedly loses resolution when sight is widened for peripheral vision.