Together with other Navy leaders, Vice Adm. Carl Chebi, Commander, Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), spoke Monday morning on a panel at the Sea-Air-Space Conference and Exposition. The panel focused on aircraft, ships and submarines and the many ways the Navy is looking to have a combat-surge ready fleet by the year 2027.
Acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Kilby moderated the panel “Ready Our Platforms,” and was flanked by Chebi; Adm. Daniel Cheever, Commander, Naval Air Forces/Commander, Naval Air Force U.S. Pacific Fleet; Vice Adm. James Downey, Commander, Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA); Vice Adm. Robert Gaucher, Commander, Naval Submarine Forces/Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet/ Commander, Allied Submarine Command; and Vice Adm. Brendan McLane, Commander Naval Surface Forces Commander, Naval Surface Force, Pacific Fleet.
“Our Navy, your Navy, is focused on increasing lethality and readiness by 2027,” Kilby said. “A ready Navy provides deterrence. A ready Navy is ready for action if called. We are driving on seven targets to achieve a ready Navy, and the first target is ‘ready platforms.’ It is the genesis of the term ‘combat-surge ready’ and the goal that we’re going to talk about today.”
Kilby said the Navy is taking many steps to reach an 80 percent combat-surge ready (CSR) fleet by lowering maintenance downtimes, examining challenges and modernizing manning, training and sustainment.
Cheever said the beginnings of reaching the current North Star began back in 2018 when the Navy was tasked with reaching 341 mission-ready aircraft, a time when the Navy was stagnating at around 250. He said by having honest and collaborative discussions with Navy leaders and industry, they achieved that goal.
“The combat-surge ready is really so that if we go to war, we have everything we need to go to war, right away and it does not impact training or production of anything else that is going on,” Cheever said.
Cheever said Chebi was instrumental in getting the aviation portion of the CSR to its current status and said other Navy leaders were taking note of initiatives enacted across platforms at NAVAIR and applying them to their own.
Chebi spoke about the challenges and achievements of the aviation community in its role in reaching the 80 percent CSR. He said NAVAIR started with getting F/A-18 Super Hornets fully mission capable.
“We figured out how to improve the outcomes. We have taken that playbook and we have scaled it across all of our other [Type/Model/Series of aircraft],” Chebi said. “We have taken that same playbook and applied it to affordability … [We examined how to] affectively apply the resources we have so that we can achieve the outcomes the fleet needs from us.”
Chebi said achieving weapon capabilities, safety and training are the current challenges NAVAIR is looking to apply its playbook to, requiring collaboration with industry and having accountability for outcomes while delivering warfighting capabilities the fleet needs.
“Keys to success, from my perspective, is that leadership must be involved,” he said. “What we’re talking about up here, we have to understand the details. This is not something that we delegate. We get the same thing from industry. This is a team sport. This is not something the government can do alone.”
McLane said he owed a great deal of his platforms success to naval aviation, notably the major changes that were made at the depot level and applying them to shipyards.
“We stood up these readiness operations centers to focus and concentrate on CASREP (Casualty Reports) burndown,” McLane said. “After doing this now for three years and we’re still at it, the [USS] Nimitz just left and we worked hard at getting her out the door. I realized that unpacking what we were learning based on data was we are getting better at something that we’re already pretty good at. … The true improvement is getting maintenance availability finished on time.”
He said the decision to train and deploy weapons and tactics instructors to the fleet has already been paying off in dividends in current conflicts, and said partnering with industry is critical to achieving CSR. He said that they have learned in pushing toward that goal that “our ships have to have maximum redundancy. We’ve learned that from fighting in the Red Sea for the past 18 months. We have 31 combat critical systems—those have to be operating and the spare parts for those operating systems have to be in the store room of that ship.”
Downey said NAVSEA delivered 12 new warships last year, twice the average of the previous five years. He said there are currently 92 ships under contract with 50 of them currently under construction.
“We need more ships in the mix to hit combat-surge ready numbers,” Downey said.
Downey said there has been a shift in planning in order to get ships built and launched on time. He said the organization is examining ways to lower modernization and maintenance times for ships, particularly destroyers and amphibious ships.
Gaucher addressed two main issues facing the submarine community in relation to achieving CSR, the first being how to get submarines out of shipyards, put into the fleet response training plan, get them ready for combat and delivered to the fleet.
“The capacity in our public shipyards right now is 10 fast-attack submarines,” Guacher said. “We have 17 fast-attack submarines in the public shipyard, so crushing that delta down to 10 is really what is going to let me drive my combat-surge ready to 80 percent. That’s the big problem we’re working on.”
Gaucher said the other issue is making sure the crew and the ship are ready. This includes ensuring the crew is trained and ready for deployment, shortening replenishment and maintenance times and that the submarines are fully equipped with ordnance.
Closing down the panel, Kilby stated where the Navy is right now in achieving its CSR goal.
“We’re at 67 percent combat-surge ready with submarines today. We’re at 68 percent combat-surge ready for surface ships and we’re at 70 percent for CVNs [aircraft carriers] and air wings. We need to get a little bit uncomfortable here and have a process change to result in a different outcome and that’s the benefit of a stretch goal. In addition to that, it provides more platforms for our fleet commanders to do what they need to do when charged.”
