I have read a few articles that bemoan the lack of repair capacity the US Navy has. Mostly this is related to a lack of dry docks for ships to get maintenance.
But why is this so? IIRC this is a problem going back to at least WWII. A dry dock does not seem anything particularly special. It’s a big hole in the ground mostly. Sure, it takes a lot of work to excavate so much soil but still…hole in the ground. Humans have been moving huge amounts of earth for ages…usually by hand (see: Great Pyramids). Add some concrete walls and some pumps and done. It is relatively simple…just big.
Yet we have precious few and it seems a constant problem. Why is this problem so difficult to solve?
Waterfront is very precious real estate. Most of the maintenance done to ships does not need drydocks.
Big picture a lot of what’s wrong with DoD funding is the prioritize buying new stuff, and de-prioritize maintaining what they have. Likewise they prize buying guns, not bullets. Why? Because Congress wants to reward defense industry corporations, not repair depot government union workers.
But every new ship needs one. I was recently at an event on Mare Island right next to a dry dock and it’s one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen. I think the OP underestimates what a complex and costly endeavor it is to construct one. It’s not just a concrete hole, it is massive cranes* and gates requiring thousands of tons of steel and engineering expertise.
*such cranes were among the first things looted by the allies after they would capture an Axis port. It was easier to ship them half way around the world than to build one from scratch.
Modern warships are big. Really big. Even the mid-sized ships (like destroyers and submarines) are typically hundreds of feet long and displace thousands of tons. Aircraft carriers are an order of magnitude bigger than that (over 1,000 feet long and about 100,000 tons displacement). You need an enclosure larger than the ship to contain it, then need locks and pumps to evacuate the water.
Or in the case of a floating drydock, you build the equivalent of a ship that is capable of supporting and lifting another ship out of the water.
None of this is easy or cheap. My submarine was supposed to go into drydock when I was serving onboard years ago, and we got bumped by another sub. We then had to steam to another port (from Groton, CT to King’s Bay, GA) to use their drydock instead. (Which sucked because we spent the whole six weeks of drydock repairs being away from home, right after our normal at-sea deployment cycle.)
Not really. Many ships are partly constructed entirely on dry land just enough to float then slid into the water. To next be fitted out while floating tied up to a pier. Some ships are built or finished in drydocks. I don’t know the mix or how that varies by size or type of ship.
The building yards are generally not the repair yards. Further, a merchant country or a navy needs enough construction drydocks for the rate they build ships. They need maintenance drydocks for the rate they repair ships. Over its life a ship may need several drydock sessions.
You’d think some DoD accountants could add up how many ships we have and figure in their scheduled repair cycles and come up with a number of drydocks needed to support all our ships. Add in a bit more for unexpected stuff. Especially if an actual war broke out and they need a lot more repair capacity. They can’t keep up with maintenance today.
Yet they either do not do that or do not care.
And that doesn’t account for all the civilian ships that need drydocks.
It’s kinda pointless to ask Congress for 10x the amount they’re willing to spend.
One of the things the Ukraine war has demonstrated, is that the USA has far less ammunition for it’s fancy weapons than any real war would require. There are plenty of posts in our two Ukraine war threads with cites attesting to all that.
Congress has not seen fit to materially increase that section of the budget.
DoD’s beancounters and strategists, Congress, and the major defense contractors are trapped in a very dysfunctional three-way game. Have been for decades now.
Every major depot-type facility is a big fat immobile juicy target.
I do not see that a shipyard is any more or less targetable than, say the Boeing née McD-D factory in St. Louis that is the sole manufacturer of F-15s & F/A-18s.
A shipyard is on the coast, reachable by cruise missile launched from a submarine, long range aircraft, or (hypothetically) a missile platform disguised as a shipping vessel. St. Louis is in the middle of the continent and for all practical purpoes could only be reached by ICBM or SLBM. OI course, if some nation is engaging in a military attack on critical defense facilities in the contienetal United States that is already a major escallation that is verging on strategic response.
You’re right St. Louis is tough from a targeting perspective. In that it was a poorly chosen example. The Marine Corps storage depot at Twenty Nine Palms California, or even the Lockheed F-35 factory in Forth Worth would be more reachable.
My point stands though, that there is nothing about a drydock over a factory or warehouse complex that inherently makes one bigger, fatter, or juicier than another. There are plenty of chokepoints in the DoD’s supply chain where taking out one location will badly dent war materiel production for a long time. Probably much longer than the war lasts.
The Marine Corps Logistics Base is in Barstow, not Twenty-Nine Palms (which is largely a training facility) and all told occupies about 2 square kilometers of area, which would require a large amount of ordnance to destroy.
US Air Force Plant 4, which builds and maintains F-16 and F-35 aircraft is in northeastern Texas, about 300 miles inland from Galveston. An opponent would have to navigate around Florida (or behind Cuba) and then onto the shallow shelf off the Texas coast in the Gulf of Mexico to make that shot. That is plausible but it would essentially be a suicide mission.
On the other hand, Norfolk and Portsmith Naval Shipyards are right on the Atlantic coast, and Pearl Harbor is vulnerable from all sides as well as IRBM and long range cruise missile attacks. Of the US Navy Shipyards, only Puget Sound at Bremerton, WA is geographically protected against an offshore attack and it only has one drydock large enough to hold a frigate or guided missile cruiser.
In WWII there was the famous St Nazaire Raid on a drydock in Normandy (France) where they rammed a whole destroyer into the drydock gate and blew it up.
If they are such easy targets why go to all that trouble? Just bomb the thing. I get bombers were less accurate back then but the drydock is big and in range of the bombers. Seems simple enough but apparently not.
Those drydocks in KBAY are massive. After getting out and becoming a contractor the first program I supported was ARCI on SSGN. I happened to be there but was held off from going to the boat for some reason or other, so I thought I’d go check out the BN/GN drydock while I was there. (I’d never been in one, only the drydocks at EB.)
No joke, when I walked over to the railing and peered into the drydock I had the briefest moment of vertigo. So enormous your brain has a little difficulty wrapping itself around it, we’re not wired to just look over a railing and see a gigantic pit like that.