Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Navy's strategic homeporting program to accommodate growth and prevent overcrowding at existing homeports, focusing on the: (1) berthing capacity of existing homeports; (2) strategic considerations that would be affected if the Navy did not open new homeports; and (3) costs to develop and operate each new homeport.
GAO found that: (1) existing homeports could accommodate their own ships as well as ships scheduled for the new homeports; (2) fleets are expected to decrease from 545 ships in fiscal year (FY) 1990 to 451 ships by FY 1995; (3) the program will not fulfill most of the original strategic objectives primarily due to the changing worldwide threat, decreasing fleet size, and budgetary restraints; (4) the Navy anticipated total costs of about $1.4 billion to develop the six new homeports and estimated that the annual operations and maintenance costs of the new homeports would total $129 million if all the planned 39 ships arrived; (5) the Navy received over $1 billion for the program from appropriations, state and local contributions, and other sources; (6) a nonrecurring savings of about $593 million could result from not opening the new homeports; and (7) annual operations and maintenance savings of about $57 million would result from berthing the ships scheduled for the new homeports at the existing homeports. GAO believes that the primary determination of the need for homeports should be whether or not they meet mission-related requirements, regardless of construction status.
