- Allies South Korea and Japan have robust shipbuilding industries.
- How they manage their shipyards and workforce, as well as build vessels, offer potential solutions for US yards.
- South Korea and Japan are the second and third biggest commercial builders behind China.
Fixing US shipbuilding problems and revitalizing American seapower has become a top priority. A pair of Pacific allies with strong industries might have answers.
South Korea and Japan are major shipbuilders, and US yards constructing Navy ships could learn from their approaches, a veteran naval affairs expert told lawmakers this week.
In a statement to the House Armed Services Committee’s Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee, expert naval affairs specialist Robert O’Rourke highlighted the success that allies like South Korea and Japan have seen in shipbuilding.
Their approaches include in-house worker training that can address capability, operations, and materials management issues, such as “monitoring and managing the flow of work through the shipyard on a continuous basis,” O’Rourke, a longtime Congressional Research Service analyst, said in written testimony.
They also embrace effective design and construction processes. South Korea, for instance, designs “ship sections with a strong focus on reducing the labor hours needed to produce them,” O’Rouke said. Doing so could mean enlarging ship sections to improve worker access to spaces and using straighter, less convoluted pipe runs “that take up more space but require less labor to produce and install.”
The cost for bigger ship sections would be higher, but the reduction in labor costs more than offsets it. The end result could make ships much “easier and less expensive to build, maintain, and modernize over their life cycles,” he wrote.
At a congressional hearing Thursday, O’Rourke said that there were lessons to be learned from both Japan and South Korea’s shipbuilding models and that the two were mentioned “almost side-by-side” when discussing best practices for world-class shipbuilding standards for efficient shipyard operations.
Another topic of discussion has revolved around how Japan maintains a steady procurement rate amid changes in force size, a long-standing struggle for the US shipbuilding industry.
There are, as O’Rourke and others said, differences between building commercial and military vessels, such as how many can be made, interior density and complexity, propulsion systems, survivability, intended life cycles, and the installation of combat systems, and all of that needs to be taken into account.
But that does not mean there aren’t potential lessons that could be applicable to US shipbuilding.
Last April, then-Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said he was “floored” by South Korea’s shipyard capabilities after a visit, especially digitization and real-time monitoring of shipbuilding progress, which included “regularly available information down to individual pieces of stock materials.”
Top South Korean shipbuilding executives are able to pinpoint the exact day when ships will be delivered, he noted at the time, a stark difference from the severe delays the US faces in shipbuilding capacity, labor availability, and resources.
How the US could capitalize on and embrace the effective shipbuilding practices of allies like Japan and South Korea — or work closer with their biggest companies — is a major focal point, as the US and its Pacific partners look carefully at China’s dominant shipbuilding empire and regional security concerns.
“Japan and South Korea are in competition with China,” O’Rourke said, “so they are trying to hold onto their market share against the Chinese shipbuilding,” pushing them to make their shipbuilding operations as effective as possible.
Automation and streamlined production processes are key to achieving that. South Korea and Japan are, respectively, the second and third largest shipbuilders behind China.
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