Image: GAO
Two key U.S. Coast Guard shipbuilding applications — the OPC and PSC tasks — are “billions of dollars over their initial cost estimates and are more than two years behind schedule,” in keeping with The U.S. Government General Accounting Office (GAO).
The watchdog company has simply launched a report [GAO-23-106948] lately given in testimony earlier than House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation. It is basically primarily based on two earlier current GAO studies on the 2 applications: GAO-23-105805, on the Offshore Patrol Cutter (OPC), and GAO-23-105949 on the Polar Security Cutter (PSC).
GAO says that its prior work reveals that profitable shipbuilding applications use stable, executable enterprise circumstances to design and construct ships. Successful applications attain essential ranges of data—akin to mature applied sciences, steady designs, and real looking value estimates—at key factors within the shipbuilding course of earlier than making important investments.
“The Coast Guard, however,” says GAO, “continues to face cost growth and schedule delays in some of its newer acquisitions because it has not obtained the right knowledge at the right time.”
In specific, the GAO says the Coast Guard faces these points with the OPC and PSC applications:
Immature applied sciences. The essential expertise of the primary 4 OPCs—the davit (a crane that deploys and retrieves a cutter’s small boats)—remains to be not matured. Without maturing the davit, the Coast Guard dangers delays and expensive rework.
Unstable design. The PSC’s design is just not but steady, which dangers an prolonged design part and contributed to a 3-year schedule delay within the shipyard, with the beginning of development of the primary cutter now deliberate for March 2024. Starting ship development with no steady design dangers expensive rework.
The delays in these applications enhance the danger of potential functionality gaps and of placing value stress on the general Coast guard portfolio says the watchdog company. For instance, in June 2023, GAO reported that the Coast Guard tasks that it’ll have a diminished variety of cutters out there for operation beginning in 2024 and thru 2039 as a result of OPC’s supply delays. Since 2010, the Coast Guard has invested a minimum of $850 million to keep up the getting old Medium Endurance Cutters and the icebreaker Polar Star. The Coast Guard is investing $250 million to increase the service life for six cutters and $75 million to increase the service lifetime of the virtually 50-year-old Polar Star till the delayed OPCs and PSCs, respectively, are operational.
