Posted: January 8, 2016 4:07 PM
Navy Installations Commander: Funding Level Does Not Meet Long-Term Needs
By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor
ARLINGTON, Va. — The admiral overseeing the Navy’s 70 installations worldwide said the funding for sustaining the bases is insufficient and will just reduce the rate of decline in base maintenance and restoration.
“Looking at our existing facilities, we’re currently funding the sustainment, restoration and modernization of our facilities only enough to maintain the overall condition of our most critical infrastructure in the short term,” Vice Adm. Dixson Smith, commander, Navy Installations Command, testified Jan. 8 before the House Armed Services readiness subcommittee. “We’re funding facilities sustainment below the Department of Defense goal of 90 percent, and our facilities are deteriorating at an accelerated rate.
“We remain committed to adequate funding of fleet operations, Sailor and family support programs and child development,” Smith said. “However, due to funding shortfalls, we continue to accept a deliberate level of risk for the remainder of our base operating support functions such as facilities services, ground maintenance, and administrative support.
“Our top priorities are sustaining that fleet readiness and also our strategic deterrent triad,” he said. “We make sure we are funding our nuclear weapons facilities and things that takes care of fleet readiness,” including shipyards, communications stations, airfield runways, supporting facilities for airfields and ports, firefighting and security forces and quality-of-life programs.
“What we’re putting ourselves into is a reactive mode,” Smith said. “We get to the point now where we don’t fix things [and] repair facilities and infrastructure that is required until it breaks. That means we take money away from things we programmed for to fix now, if it’s an operational necessity or [something] like air conditioning systems in a child development center.”
“Oftentimes, it feels like we’re treating symptoms and not the root problem,” said Capt. Louis J. Schager, commanding officer of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Va., also testifying at the hearing.
Schager pointed to the example of aircraft hangars needing repairs and the delays caused by inadequate funding. He said that even if full funding was restored the station could not repair all of the hangars in short order because of the backlog caused by the funding shortfall.
“There’s only so much to go around,” Rear Adm. Mary Jackson, commander, Navy Region Southeast, said at the hearing. “Although we have a plan to change out an entire system [a chiller system at a dry dock, for example], we end up dealing with the breakages that occur. We will fix pieces and parts rather than holistically when a whole system needs to be fixed. So we then get hit twice because we do the small repair, but then we still have to do the longer, big repair to get us back to where we need to be.
“We’re very good at finding alternatives when we need to when we’re in extremis and we know that the warfighter can no longer do what the need to do,” Jackson said.” We also look at the process by which these projects are racked and stacked and that we are able to articulate, from an installations perspective, the direct correlation to readiness.”
http://www.seapowermagazine.org/stories/20160108-cnic.html
