The Navy said yesterday that it was doubling the frequency at which ships will undergo comprehensive inspections to get a more accurate reflection of fleet readiness.
The changes were announced by Rear Adm. Robert Wray, the president of the Navy’s Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV), and also include a new grading system for assessing the condition of ships.
The new program that took effect Tuesday now calls for ships to undergo inspections every 30 months rather than every five years, INSURV said.
“The Navy is always working to improve how we assess our ships,” Wray said. “Over time, we came to the conclusion that ships aren’t being looked at often enough to give leadership the readiness information we want, and to give ship’s crews the practice they need to get through the inspections on their own. Hence the move to double the frequency of inspections.”
Under the new policy, INSURV inspectors will conduct the usual “material inspection” during a ship and crew’s fleet readiness plan (FRP) cycle, and the second one in the inspection cycle will be carried out by the type commander with INSURV support, the board said.
INSURV said it has eliminated a grading system that declared a ship “satisfactory,” “degraded” or “unsatisfactory,” in favor of a model that takes a weighted average of 30 scores to quantify the overall readiness of a ship. INSURV said the old system “oversimplified” inspection results for a ship with nearly 200 sub-systems.
The goal of the new process includes relying less on preparing for an INSURV while instead emphasizing the need to prepare for deployments and allowing INSURV to measure a ship’s condition as part of that process, INSURV said. Wray said the approach is designed to produce a “culture of material readiness.”
“First, each ship, prior to each deployment, will have a full-blown material inspection in which the ship will be expected to get underway, do full power, anchor, shoot guns, operate combat systems, etc., for a team of external inspectors,” Wray said in the statement. “Second, ships will be expected to do this on their own, without months of external preparation and assistance.”
“The concept is to create a culture for material readiness, in which any ship, at any time in the appropriate part of the FRP, could successfully shoot their guns, do full-power runs, anchor, and demonstrate her combat systems,” he added.