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As the Cold War defense economy winds down, the fights °ver naval installations and the fate of the industrial base have begun to interact. Northern Ordnance/FMC makes heavy naval guns, such as the Mk-45 5-in/54-caliber gun, and missile launchers, like the Mk-41. It is also responsible for some important new developments, such as the Navy’s electro-thermal gun, which may ultimately replace the Gatling gun as the primary close-in defense against approaching missiles. The Louisville-Crane Naval Ordnance Station is the main refurbisher of U.S. naval weapons and is the repository of U.S. naval ordnance data. It also has an important manufacturing capability; it undertakes jobs for which the commercial profit margin is insufficient (as in Standard Missile motor casings) and has often done vital quick-reaction jobs, such as providing 25-mm gun mounts for ships deploying to the Persian Gulf.
With the fleet shrinking, new construction also must decline. With it goes much of FMC’s business. Apparently, someone within the company decided that the best strategy Was to gather in most of the heavy naval gun- mount refurbishment orders. To do that, FMC had to beat off Louisville, which had been winning refurbishment contracts on a competitive basis. As reported in the national media, the company managed to have Louisville, which the Navy had listed as a vital asset, included in the list of bases to be considered for elimination. A leaked internal FMC memo apparently admitted that this strategy was a long shot but claimed that only one of the two could survive over time.
Ironically, the overlap between FMC and Louisville is quite small. Each is extremely important, but in a different way. At one time, U.S. gun mounts were designed by the Bureau of Ordnance. Companies like FMC were brought in to produce them to Navy specifications. Because the Navy retained the specialized design expertise, companies could come and go. All they needed was sufficient attention to strict quality control. The Army had a similar system. In the 1960s, however,
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara decided that design as well as production should be shifted to the private sector of the economy. Airplanes were already being made successfully that way. Moreover, Me- Namara probably thought that competition at the design level would make for better designs. That was certainly the case with the contest for DDX, which became the Spruance (DD-963) class. In the case of ships, the Navy took back the basic design function, in part because private designers, lacking the necessary long-term experience, might produce unbalanced results.
In the case of heavy guns, FMC became, in effect, a privately
owned equivalent of the old Bureau of Ordnance. It took over the highly specialized design of ammunition hoists and other mechanisms. It is most unlikely that any similar pool of experience exists elsewhere in the country, particularly since me chanical engineering skills are declining in relation _to electrical and computer-oriented ones. Gun-mount deslgtt hard y trivial matter. The predecessor to the Mk-45, the Mk-42, wa plagued by jams to the extent that it had to be derated to ha its design rate of fire. FMC did not conceive the Mk-45, but it certainly has been responsible for much of its development since conception. To the extent that improved guns are worthwhile, it would seem foolish to abandon this pool of talent.
Nor would it be easy to abandon Louisville. Ships and weapons are durable items. Only a government organization can be relied upon to maintain stocks of the necessary old drawings, and to produce spare parts on demand. For example, wit - out Louisville’s records, the Iowa (BB-61)-class battleships
First JAS-39 Gripen Delivered
SAAB MILITARY AIRCRAFT
In June, the Swedish Air Force received its first Gripen, the only lightweight fighter in the world to combine the interceptor, attack, and reconnaissance roles in a single system. The planes carry the wing-tip mounted Sidewinder missile, the Maverick missile, and the air-launched
version of the RBS-15 missile.
probably could not have been recommissioned. There is a reason that they have been carefully mothballed rather than stricken for scrap. It is not sentiment. If the records are lost, it literally may be impossible to resuscitate them again, whatever their material condition. That is aside from the rehabilitation work Louisville does on ordnance FMC does not produce, and in which it has no interest. For example, Louisville is responsible
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for rebuilding Phalanx guns as they come in from the fleet. It also rebuilds such weapons for many foreign navies.
The collision of a respected ordnance maker and a valued naval asset is particularly unpleasant, but it is a symptom of a much larger problem. Many manufacturers of military equipment, from vehicles to airplanes to ships, see little future in their current line of work. Even if they can remain open, a much smaller number of military items will have to carry much more overhead. As unit prices rise, procurement will continue to decline in a deadly spiral. Something other than new production must carry some of that overhead. The main military candidate must be refurbishment. For example, one strategy for saving Electric Boat is to give it more contracts for submarine refuelings and other overhauls, to make up for the loss of contracts to build new submarines.
In the past, the services have often conducted their overhauls in-house, while relying on the civilian sector for new construction. The manufacturers had little trouble with this arrangement as long as the level of new production was kept high. Now that the trend has reversed, many must feel that FMC took the right approach. Will Newport News now see the Norfolk Navy Yard as a competitor to be killed off in Washington?
Right now, there is enough business to support the big private yards, particularly if the government yards are killed off. What then happens if business declines further? Much of the West is now deep in recession. Defense budgets are already being cut drastically. Many will surely agree that they should not be cut too much more, but governments are not always wise. There may well come a point at which the private yards find it unprofitable to operate, even if there is no government competition at all. What then? Shipyards occupy prime waterfront property. Several of the old navy yards already cannot be revived because their graving docks have been filled in and their land area sold for residential development. The same fate could easily overtake a defunct commercial yard. As long as the government yards survive, the United States can be sure that it will have at least a fallback position to maintain its fleet. Surely that is worth a great deal.
It has been so long since the United States entered a true period of peace that we have forgotten what that entails. Some history may, therefore, be instructive. In 1918, both the United States and Britain had large naval industries. Much of the U.S. industrial base was owned by the government, in the form of navy yards. There were also some major private builders, such as Bath, Cramps, Newport News, and Bethlehem Steel. In Britain, the bulk of the industrial base was in private hands. The long buildup to World War I had encouraged a large investment. Then the naval-arms market collapsed. In 1921 the U.S. government suggested a naval-arms-limitation treaty that included a ten-year “holiday” in battleship construction. The British delegation to the Washington Conference saw what that could mean to the British private sector. Nevertheless, the British government was far too interested in economy to care; the Board of Trade formally certified that the “holiday” would not kill off the industry.
But that is exactly what happened. Several of the major builders, such as Armstrong and Beardmore, went out of business. In addition, the British lost so much of their private armormaking industry that they had to import armor from Czechoslovakia (and then from Germany, when the Czech producers were seized in 1938) up until the outbreak of war in 1939. Britain still had a considerable naval industrial base when war broke out, but it was only a shadow of its pre-1914 self. Its decline had real consequences. For example, in 1939 six fleet carriers were under construction. Britain already had six in service, but
it lost one in each of the first three years of war, and two in 1942 Its industry could not work fast enough to replace them, and this had a deleterious effect on operations in 1942-43.
The U.S. situation was quite different. Even though there was little new construction in the 1920s, the Navy yards survived.
One of the largest private builders, Cramps, did not. The yards had such a large capacity, however, that they could easily overcome that loss when the United States began to rearm in the late 1930s. Early U.S. carrier losses were even more gruesome than those of the Royal Navy (four of seven in 1942), but the q replacements arrived in time to crush Japan in 1943-45. si
Submarines became a subject of considerable controversy. f Through the 1920s, almost no new ones were authorized. It is f:
probably fair to say that no private builder specializing in sub- v
marines could have survived the drought. Electric Boat man- -j
aged to survive because it remained a design office and a diesel- § engine builder, associated with a major yacht business (Elco). | The yards that actually built its submarines, such as Fore j River (later Bethlehem Quincy), also survived—because sub- s marines were only part of their business. ) £
At the time, the Navy deliberately withheld business from 5
Electric Boat. The company had designed and built the bulk <
of its World War I submarines. It held John Holland’s vital j
patents on submarine design. Late in the war, the S-boats, the j first truly oceangoing U.S. submarines, were introduced. To power them, Electric Boat had to build a new engine with double the power output of its standard diesel. The design was ■ sloppy; the new engine suffered horribly from a common diesel , ailment, torsional vibration. To pass the diesel’s engineering test, Electric Boat bolted it down to the heaviest piece of machinery in its plant. That damped the vibrations. When the same engine was installed in a submarine, it fell apart. Many of the Navy’s submariners considered this the final straw. They suspected that in earlier designs Electric Boat had accepted inferior performance in order to keep using its patented design features, on which it enjoyed royalties.
The post-World War I Navy, then, much preferred to move design in-house, to the Portsmouth Navy Yard, where commercial concerns would not, in theory, compromise quality of design. Ironically, within five years or so, many submarine officers were complaining that the Navy designers were too conservative, and indeed that “buy American” clauses were precluding the purchase of lighter, more compact equipment—available only in Europe. Electric Boat continued to survive, partly on the strength of an order from the Peruvian Navy- It was a very hungry company. In hopes of obtaining new orders, it worked hard on a new generation of diesels. Many officers came to consider it much more forward-looking than the Navy designers. In 1927, the new Submarine Officers Conference demanded the end of retrogressive design practices, and a return to a truly forward-looking builder—Electric Boat, of course. Within a few years the United States was rearming, and . Electric Boat and Portsmouth could coexist happily.
The moral of the story is simple: In lean times, the government should maintain means of production (which will inevitably be under-used), but it should try to keep private design, development, and planning expertise alive. Can that actually be done?
Many would suggest that unless production occurs, design and development are futile exercises. Clearly, no solution can be totally satisfactory. Any solution that drastically cuts production at private plants disperses their skilled work force. Economic theory does not take into account the time factor in rebuilding such a work force (if that can be done at all), but national policy ought to be wiser. At the least, it ought to be sufficiently supple not to throw out vital national resources, whether publicly or privately owned.