By Richard Abott
Defense Daily
The secretary of the Navy and chief of naval operations (CNO) told congressional appropriators this week that the service is trying to build more margin in the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program.
House appropriators raised concerns about the Columbia program’s cost and schedule margin given a tight timeline, especially following an April 8 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that said the submarine’s procurement cost was overly optimistic about labor hour assumptions.
Columbia is the Navy’s top acquisition program, the service maintains.
Prompted by a question from House Appropriations defense subcommittee Ranking Member Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said the service recognizes these issues and is going to meet with top officials from shipbuilders Huntington Ingalls Industries and General Dynamics Electric Boat.
“We do have concern, I would be remiss if I didn’t say that. We’re sitting down with industry to look at the supply chain, to look at both primes that are involved, to ensure that we can manage the risk, that we can build in some margin where we can, that we can sweep risk on a continual basis,” Spencer told the subcommittee on Tuesday.
“If we do not do this in lockstep with industry, it will run off the rails, I guarantee you that. We are focused on this from the executive level on down,” he added.
In response to a question from Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) on whether the Navy needs additional funds authorized in fiscal 2021, Spencer said “we’re set on our budget requirements as we need them right now, and authorities.”
Spencer said he plans to meet “in the next two weeks … to do a finite drill-down of not only the program itself, but the underlying supply chain that’s involved with both of those programs to ensure that we do have a handle on this. And we are extracting margin when we can, and performance where we can.”
The secretary acknowledged the GAO report is correct, “we do not have a lot of margin, and this is right in front of us, right now. But we plan to manage this through appropriately.”
There is some discord about the margin remaining in the Columbia program.
The April 8 GAO report said manufacturing errors on Columbia missile tubes by BWX Technologies had left the program with about eight months of margin.
But in a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the Navy’s director of strategic systems programs, said “[w]e have an 11-month margin” in the Columbia program.
The Navy is replacing the current fleet of 14 Ohio-class submarines with 12 Columbia boats, the first of which is slated to start construction in 2021 and deploy in the early 2030s.
The vessels will carry Trident II-D5 missiles tipped with W76-1 warheads provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). A small number of missiles will carry the W76-2 low-yield warheads the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency plans to start delivering to the Navy by Sept. 30.
Besides the missile tubes, BWX Technologies is set to manufacture the reactors for the Columbia vessels under a contract the company expects to be definitized this summer.
Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor staff contributed to this report from Washington. This story first appeared in NS&D Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily.
