US Navy implements new inspection process for in-service ships

Two destroyers and an aircraft carrier are among the first ships scheduled to undergo the US Navy's (USN's) revamped materiel inspection process, officials told IHS Jane's on 11 January.

The USN is doubling the frequency of materiel inspections of its ships and changing how it reflects those assessments in an effort to provide fleet commanders with better information about ship readiness and maintenance needs.

Beginning this year, the service's Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV), which oversees the shipboard materiel inspections of USN vessels every 60 months, will conduct ship inspections every 30 months and provide final assessments in the form of a numerical grade to allow navy officials to rank and compare ships within a class and to improve trend tracking.

"The system is not broken. These are not fixes that you are employing because things are wrong. We're just trying to improve a process and to better achieve our goals to get information on the status of the readiness of the fleet," Rear Admiral Robert Wray, INSURV president, told IHS Jane's . "It's a resource-constrained world and the more information we have, the better we can allocate those resources."