RAND: UK Offers Shipbuilding Industry Lessons for USA

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In Testimony presented before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Seapower on April 6, 2006, John F. Schank of the RAND Corporation noted some work they had done with Britain’s Ministry of Defence regarding its naval industrial base, and made a number of recommendations based on those lessons:

“Demands on the U.S. naval shipbuilding industrial base have also been falling, resulting in concerns, for example, about the submarine design base. At the same time, the United States also faces a likely future increase in demand, as the Navy builds to a 313-ship fleet. Let me review some of the suggestions we made to the UK MOD in three respects – the need for long-range planning, ways to improve efficiency, and the need to sustain hard-to-replace resources – and then I will conclude with some possible implications for the United States.

Here is the full transcript of his testimony and recommendations.