Originally Posted by
Asturias56
Isn't there talk of ordering 2 x Fords at a time? They did that with some of the Nimitz class and saved about US$1 Bn a ship - as well as being able to deliver them a bit faster...............
There is talk of authorizing and doing a multi-year contract for two, but the US does not have the capability any more to build two carriers simultaneously. With all the closures and cutbacks over the decades, Newport News has the only two drydocks capable of building a new CVN, and only one of them is available for that purpose.
The reason is that only one of those docks is capable of accommodating a carrier of operational displacement. The other dock is the one used to assemble carriers, and at a certain point the carrier is floated out and towed to the pier where the ship is completed in the water, which takes at least another year or more. The reason they don't use the bigger dock is that because it can accommodate a fully operational carrier, it is the dock used for carriers going through RICOH. Because of that, scheduling of that dock is critical. At one point the Obama Administration was talking of postponing the RICOH of one of the carriers, but the net effect of that (because of the next carriers in line) would have been to retire a carrier with half of its useful life left. A back door way of reducing the carrier fleet.
We once were able to build more than one CVN at a time, and it did save buckets of money because long lead time items could be ordered in bulk and as certain parts of the workforce finished types of tasks on one ship they could move over to the ship that was at an earlier stage of construction rather than laying them off or paying for part of the workforce to do other things until the nest carrier was started. It also helps pass down institutional knowledge which reduced costs because the workforce didn't have to relearn the task with each ship. In those days the CVNs were new enough that they weren't yet regularly going through RICOH so both docks could be used.
If they were authorized and funded to do so, a CVN could be built in four years using normal work weeks and would cost at least a billion dollars less.