Defense Infrastructure: Ability of Ship Maintenance Industrial Base to Support a Nuclear Aircraft Carrier at Naval Station Mayport

Since established as a naval base in December 1942, Naval Station Mayport, Florida, as grown to become the third largest naval fleet concentration area in the United States and the second largest on the East Coast. During this time, the base has served as the home port for multiple types of Navy surface ships--reaching a peak of over 30 ships including two conventional carriers in 1987. The most recent conventionally powered carrier to be homeported there--the USS John F. Kennedy--was decommissioned in 2007. Prior to the USS John F. Kennedy's retirement, the Department of Defense's (DOD) 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review called for the Navy to provide more warfighting assets more quickly to multiple locations, and, to meet this requirement, the Navy made a preliminary decision to homeport additional surface ships at Mayport. The Navy subsequently prepared an environmental impact statement to evaluate a broad range of strategic home port and dispersal options for Atlantic Fleet surface ships in Mayport and on January 14, 2009, issued its decision to pursue an option that would include the first-time homeporting of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier at Mayport. The Navy's decision was reviewed as part of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, which in its report supported the Navy's decision to homeport a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in Mayport, indicating that homeporting an East Coast carrier in Mayport would contribute to mitigating the risk of a terrorist attack, accident, or natural disaster occurring in Norfolk, Virginia, where currently all of the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers on the East Coast are homeported. In House Report 111-491, accompanying a proposed bill for the Fiscal Year 2011 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 5136), the House Committee on Armed Services directed the Secretary of the Navy to report by December 15, 2010, to the congressional defense committees on (1) the ability of the private ship maintenance industrial base in northeast Florida to support nuclear-powered aircraft carrier maintenance requirements; (2) the likely costs to the Navy that could result from establishing such maintenance capabilities within the local industrial base; and (3) the impacts on cost and workforce scheduling that could result if the Navy must provide the maintenance workforce from another nuclear-powered aircraft carrier home-port location. The Navy issued its report to the congressional defense committees on December 29, 2010.5 In the same House report, the committee also directed GAO to assess and report on the Secretary of the Navy's report within 90 days of receiving the Navy's report and to conduct an assessment of aspects of the local ship maintenance industrial base and determine to what extent the homeporting of a carrier at Mayport would affect carrier maintenance costs. In response to the House report, our objectives were to determine to what extent (1) the private ship repair firms in northeast Florida can meet the maintenance requirements of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and (2) the Navy's December 2010 report addresses the provisions directed by House Report 111-491. The House report also directed us to assess how the construction of maintenance facilities for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier at Naval Station Mayport will affect maintenance costs for the carrier, including recurring and nonrecurring costs over a 10-year budget window.