Today, only about 20 dry docks and two ancient sub-tenders remain, according to Janes and U.S. In 1988, the Navy could claim immediate access to around 50 dry docks, marine railways and lifts. At the height of the Cold War in 1984, the Navy had 10 commissioned destroyer tenders, 13 submarine tenders, five big repair ships and 17 floating dry docks kept busy maintaining and fixing naval vessels. Over the decades, company executives and their lobbyists have been enormously successful in pushing Congress to eliminate their competition by defunding taxpayer-owned ship maintenance and repair facilities. The shipbuilding industry hates this idea. This will make the recapitalization of the existing public yards far easier and, ultimately, far less costly to the taxpayer. There is an alternative: add a national shipyard. Related: Pentagon Owns Fewer Buildings Than Previously Thought: Audit Related: The US Navy Should Start Weaning its Reactors off Bomb-Grade Uranium Related: The US Navy Is Developing Mothership Drones for Coastal Defense And even with a leisurely 20-year schedule, no shipyard manager on earth could modernize America’s old and oversubscribed shipyards without risking major disruption. Given the immediate threat of a great-power challenge at sea, the timeline is unrealistic. Rather than employing the looming threat of maritime competition to demand better maintenance facilities and sufficient funding, somnolent Navy leaders have proposed a decades-long, $21 billion plan to fix obsolete dry docks, recapitalize aged equipment and optimize facilities. industrial history - the last remnants of a proud 12-national-shipyard empire - are stretched to the breaking point. Add in the constant threat of sequestration and budget cuts, and these vital pieces of U.S. Portsmouth Naval Shipyard began operations in 1800, and it has been challenged to accommodate the ever-growing fleet of Virginia-class submarines, the future mainstay of America’s attack sub force. Norfolk Naval Shipyard, founded by the British in 1767, will need a refit to maintain new Ford-class aircraft carriers. These taxpayer-owned yards are essentially living historical sites, centuries-old facilities that struggle to accommodate cutting-edge naval platforms. Today, 71 nuclear-powered submarines and 11 aircraft carriers depend upon maintenance at old, creaky public shipyards in Maine, Virginia, Hawaii, and Washington State. And despite reams of studies detailing the Navy’s maintenance challenges, official Washington is overlooking the obvious solution: open a new national shipyard. Budget documents show that their workload exceeds their capacity by 117 to 153 percent - that is, there’s too much to get done and too few dry docks to do it. Navy’s four public shipyards are overwhelmed.
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