The latest issue of the annual Government Accountability Office (GAO) assessment of major defense acquisition programs outlined remaining risks to the design and on-time production of the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine (SSBN).
In its Defense Acquisition Annual Assessment, published June 3, the GAO noted while the Navy reports the nuclear reactor technology as mature since 2018, “several other technologies we previously identified as critical remain immature.”
The GAO explained that manufacturing challenges delayed delivery of the first production-representative motor for the integrated power system by two years to 2019.
“The Navy still plans to concurrently test the motor, update its design, and build the lead submarine’s motor, then deliver the integrated power system to the shipyard in October 2022 as scheduled despite the compressed timeframe created by this delay,” the report says.
The Navy also does not expect the propulsor and shafting to reach maturity until the lead vessel is delivered in fiscal year 2026 because the Navy does not plan to test all components together in their final form and function before delivery.
However, “if deficiencies in these immature technologies emerge during testing, they could cause costly and time-intensive design changes and re-work, jeopardizing the lead submarine’s first patrol date,” the GAO warned.
The report notes that as of September 2019, shipbuilder General Dynamics [GD] Electric Boat completed 100% of the basic and functional design of the submarine. However, the GAO still said “risks to design stability remain.”
Notably, it said design stability is based on assumptions about the final form, fit, and function of critical technologies and how they will perform in a realistic environment. However, the program has not demonstrated that yet.
The GAO said a key tenet of the program’s cost and schedule goals assumes GD will finish 83% of detail design by October 2020.
“Over the past year, the shipbuilder missed its monthly detail design goals due to inefficient design software. Program officials report the shipbuilder increased its design staff in an effort to recover its schedule. However, delayed detail designs are impacting material orders, slowing construction progress, and jeopardizing the design completion goal,” according to the report.
The report says the Navy is also still assessing the cost and schedule impacts of fixing weld defects in missile tubes for the common missile compartment. This is causing the shipbuilder to produce a replacement missile tube section for the lead submarine.
The GAO said the weld issue underscored how “supplier quality and capacity continue to pose a risk to the lead submarine’s delivery schedule.”
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic affecting welders, delivery of missile tubes may be a few months late, Rear Adm. Scott Pappano, the Columbia program executive officer, said this week.
“[T]hat did hit us hard on the missile tubes, to the extent of probably a couple months delay in the overall missile tube production line,” Pappano said Monday during a webcast hosted by a Washington-based group, the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance.
Early in the pandemic — which reached the U.S. in January and had shut down all but essential industries by the end of March — some welders at BWX Technologies of Lynchburg, Va., and two other missile tube vendors were unable to come to work, Pappano said.
Perhaps the worst hit was Babcock Marine, the U.K.-based tube vendor within Babcock International, Pappano said.
All three vendors are building tubes for common missile compartments that future Columbia, Virginia, and British-built Dreadnought submarines all will use.
The tube work has been snakebitten since late 2018, when BWX Technologies improperly welded a dozen common missile tubes intended for Columbia boats. The company honed in on a fix, and thought it would finish the work in 2020. However, the cost of those repairs wiped out its profits on the tube subcontracts with Electric Boat.
Despite ongoing and varied difficulties with the missile tubes, Pappano said the Navy is on track to award a contract modification that will allow Electric Boat to start building the first Columbia hull around October. The service and its prime are negotiating a two-sub block buy that Congress will have to approve.
So far, Pappano said, “I don’t see any institutional resistance to doing that” from the White House Office of Management and Budget, or Congress. He also said that, if there is a continuing resolution this year that extends 2020 budgets past Sept. 30, the Navy will need a funding anomaly, plus permission for a new start, to begin the first Columbia build.
The GAO said after the weld issue was discovered, the Navy and GD reviewed supplier quality assurance practices and “found weld quality problems throughout the industrial base due to increased demand from shipbuilding programs and a reduction in independent supplier oversight.”
In response, the GAO said the Navy is increasing oversight of high-risk suppliers and investing in improving quality.
The report includes Columbia-class program office comments that the Navy recognizes the supplier base is still at “high risk and is committed to increased oversight on manufacturing issues and readiness assessments.”
The Navy has repeatedly said the Columbia-class submarine is its top acquisition priority and if needed it could shift acquisition funds to maintain its schedule.
However, in 2019 the program manager said the Navy’s schedule had little margin for the vessel since it has already extended the service life of the existing Ohio-class SSBNs to 42 years.
It will cost around $110 billion to build all 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, including about $14 billion for the first boat and $9 billion for the second, according to the White House’s 2021 budget request. The first vessel would go on patrol starting in the 2030s, with subsequent vessels gradually replacing the current ballistic-missile fleet of 14 Ohio-class boats.
Parts of this story first appeared in Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication, Defense Daily.
