Naval Shipyard Maintenance Backlogs Cost 1,600+ Submarine Delay-Days

The four U.S. public naval shipyards (Norfolk, Puget Sound, Pearl Harbor, Portsmouth) are responsible for maintaining the Navy's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, but they consistently fail to complete maintenance on time. In fiscal year 2023, submarine maintenance periods accumulated over 1,600 delay-days -- meaning submarines sat in dry dock months beyond their scheduled completion dates, unavailable for deployment. Attack submarines have spent an average of 20% of their operational lives in unplanned extended maintenance since 2015, effectively reducing the deployable submarine fleet by the equivalent of 8-10 boats. This directly degrades combat readiness. Every day a submarine sits in a shipyard beyond its scheduled departure is a day it cannot conduct intelligence collection, deter adversaries, or prepare for wartime missions. The U.S. submarine fleet was designed around a force structure of 66 attack submarines to meet combatant commander requirements, but the Navy fields only 49 SSNs and can deploy far fewer due to maintenance delays. Meanwhile, China's submarine fleet is growing and the Navy's own analysis says it needs 66+ SSNs to execute its war plans. The workforce crisis at public shipyards is the proximate cause. The shipyards are short approximately 3,400 workers as of 2024, and the workers they do have are less experienced than their predecessors because the yards lost a generation of skilled tradespeople during the post-Cold War drawdown. Training a nuclear-qualified shipyard worker takes 3-5 years, and the shipyards compete for the same welders, pipefitters, and electricians that the commercial construction and energy sectors want, often at higher wages and without the security clearance requirements. Structurally, the problem traces back to decades of deferred infrastructure investment. The four public shipyards average 76 years old and operate with industrial equipment, dry docks, and facilities designed for World War II and Cold War-era ships. The Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP) was launched in 2018 with a 20-year, $21 billion modernization plan, but it competes for funding against new ship construction and weapons procurement in every budget cycle. Congress and the Navy have consistently chosen to fund new platforms over maintaining the infrastructure needed to keep existing platforms operational -- a pattern that creates a vicious cycle of deferred maintenance generating more deferred maintenance. The public shipyard model itself is part of the problem. As government-owned, government-operated (GOGO) facilities, the yards cannot easily adjust wages, hire laterally, or adopt commercial best practices without navigating layers of federal employment regulations, union agreements, and congressional oversight that slow every decision.