Ship Clips

 

A compilation of articles concerning the Shipbuilding Industry

From the Congressional Shipbuilding Caucus

                                                                                                 

June 2014

 

Navy Altered Destroyer Upgrades Due To Budget Pressure, Demand For Ships

(U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE NEWS 03 JUN 14) ... Sam LaGrone

In Era Of Tight Budgets, How Many Aircraft Carriers Are Enough?

(STARS AND STRIPES 08 JUN 14) ... Jon Harper

Lockheed Martin’s LCS Follow-On Could Subtract A Helicopter, Executive Says

(DEFENSE DAILY 09 JUN 14) ... Mike McCarthy

Tricky Waters Of Comparing Shipbuilding Costs

(DEFENSE NEWS 16 JUN 14) ... Robert Holzer

Navy Engineers LCS Changes

(DOD BUZZ 27 JUN 14) ... Kris Osborn

 

 

Navy Altered Destroyer Upgrades Due To Budget Pressure, Demand For Ships

(U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE NEWS 03 JUN 14) ... Sam LaGrone

Budget pressure and an insatiable demand for ships capable of bulls eyeing ballistic missiles drove the Navy to alter its plan to upgrade Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers (DDG-51), officials with the Navy surface warfare policy division (OPNAV N96) told USNI News during a Thursday briefing at the Pentagon.

Originally, the service had planned for 62 ships (DDG-51 to 107) in the class to receive an upgrade that would have modernized each ship’s Aegis weapon system’s ability to track and defeat ballistic missiles and fight more traditional anti-air warfare (AAW) threats in a plan the Navy calls Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD).

The upgrade to the so-called Aegis Baseline 9 standard for all of the ships was shelved in favor of a more cost effective midlife upgrade that targets certain ships for the full upgrade – and for others boost existing systems to a higher ballistic missile defense (BMD) capability.

Budget Crunch

Started in 2007, the Aegis modernization program was designed to upgrade all of the Navy’s Burkes to what was then called Aegis Advanced Capability Build (ACB) 12 – now commonly referred to as Baseline 9.

The ships would be able to fight the emerging threat of ballistic missiles as well as aircraft and cruise missiles using upgrades to the Lockheed Martin SPY-1 air defense radar and a combination of Raytheon Standard Missiles (SM).

But in the last few years the Navy changed tack following the sequestration budget limits on the services following the passage of the Budget Control Act of 2011.

“Before we went to sequestration we were planning to do a bunch of stuff for the DDGs. Sequestration happened. Plans changed,” Capt. Dave McFarland, deputy of surface warfare (N96) for the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) told USNI News.

“So going forward now we have to be strategic on the way we apply priorities to our ships and our modernization programs.”

Last week, USNI News reported the Navy would not upgrade 21 out 28 Flight I and II DDGs to the IAMD Baseline 9 standard and the ships would instead have an upgrade focused on hull, mechanical and electrical (HM&E) systems.

Based on the Navy’s historical record – ships with HM&E centric availabilities can become targets of decommissioning through obsolescence.

McFarland – who sits on the U.S. Naval Institute’s board of directors – and others in N96 insisted the ships would remain in the fleet to their expected 35 year service life even with the reduced scope of Aegis weapon system upgrades for the older ships.

The new and cheaper plan will improve the Flight I and II ships – with the exception of seven that will be upgraded to Baseline 9 – to a BMD standard of 4.1 from the original 3.6 baseline but retain the legacy military standard (MILSPEC) computers.

The ships with the full Baseline 9 upgrade – including an upgrade to BMD 5 – will shed their 1980s era AN/UYK-43 32-bit MILSPEC computers, completely strip out the ship’s combat information center and install a new series of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers to process the targeting information from the ship’s SPY-1 air defense radar.

Baseline 9 ships will receive a new Lockheed Martin Multi-Mission Signal Processor to the SPY-1 radar while the MILSPEC ships will receive a separate BMD signals processor, Capt. Jim W. Kilby, deputy for ballistic missile defense, Aegis, destroyers and Future Surface Combatants (N96F) said on Thursday.

MILSPEC vs. COTS

The split in midlife upgrades will create two types of Burkes – legacy MILSPEC ships with stable but older hardware and COTS ships that require more work upfront but are more easily upgraded.

“It’s the tradeoff of taking a reliable system tweak it and get as much horsepower out of it as I can based on how much life it has left and invest in the future capability in those COTS based ships,” Lt. Cdr. Jason Deutsch, N96′s Aegis Combat System Branch Head, said on Thursday.

The cost of the COTS system – in both time and money – was a major factor in the decision to scrap the full Baseline 9 upgrade in the older ships, according to N96.

The MILSPEC, BMD 4.1 plan for the 21 older Flight I and II DDGs will cost $112.7 million and runs for about 6 months, according to information from N96 provided to USNI News.

The full COTS, BMD 5.0 and Baseline 9 upgrade costs $183.8 million and takes more than a year and a half to complete.

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA), in partnership with the Navy, is contributing $42 million per ship for the BMD component as an adjunct to its strategic BMD mission.

“The attractiveness is they can be installed in half of the time and half of the cost and [part of] the cost is borne by MDA,” said Capt. Dominic DeScisciolo, deputy, operations, maintenance and modernization (N96G) for OPNAV, told USNI News.

“We’re getting a lot of bang for the buck in the end. All 62 ships will be modernized.”

Outside of the AAW and BMD missions, the ships will also receive a boost in their anti-submarine warfare (ASW) equipment with the inclusion of Lockheed Martin’s AN/SQQ-89A(V)15 upgrade.

“We’re not walking away from the multi-mission capability of a guided missile destroyer, McFarland said.

“In fact we’re doubling down on that capability.”

BMD Focus

The biggest difference between the legacy BMD 3.6 software versus the 4.1 upgrade is the ability for the ship to intercept so-called sea based terminal BMD threats – short-range missiles on their final path to the target and a more sophisticated interceptor.

“They’re going to have a ballistic missile signal processor and they are going to be able to fire the SM-3IB missile,” Kilby said.

But like the older versions, BMD 4.1 won’t be able to fulfill the traditional air defense role at the same time its set for the BMD mission.

The BMD 5 upgrade – included with Baseline 9 – allows ships to do both simultaneously.

In addition to the cost and time savings, the move does a better job to sate the various U.S. international combatant commands (COCOMS) demand for BMD ships, N96 said.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), U.S. European/Africa Command (EUCOM/AFRICOM) and U.S. Pacific Command have consistently requested Aegis BMD ships to protect against missile threats from Iran and North Korea – among others.

That COCOM demand is pushing to get as many BMD capable ships out there as a priority.

In the last several years, the Navy was tasked to focus more of its efforts on Aegis ballistic missile defense.

In conjunction with the MDA, the service is a key component of the European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) with four BMD destroyers based at Naval Station Rota, Spain and Aegis Ashore installations in Romania and Poland.

Communicating Change

The change in the upgrade posture from all 62 DDGs to Baseline 9 to the tiered upgrade model was born under the pressure of sequestration and COCOM demand but not telegraphed to interests outside the Navy.

All legislative and naval sources outside of Naval Sea Systems Command and N96 were unaware of the changes in the DDG upgrades when contacted by USNI News in the last several weeks during the reporting for last week’s story.

N96 admitted it could have done a better job informing more on the change.

“It’s not like we’re not talking about it. We are,” McFarland said.

“It’s just that you haven’t heard about it and when you look at the budget and you look at the execution piece, it may appear that we’re not talking about it for the explicit reason that we’re going to let [these ships] die out. It’s quite the contrary.”

It’s unclear if N96 will receive legislative push back from the change in the upgrade program.

Several congressional sources told USNI News they were waiting for more detail on the plan before they would comment on the restructured Aegis modernization program.

“When you look at the merits of our plan we are able to retain these destroyers, get them updated to meet fleet demands and we are doing that in a way that is fiscally responsible,” McFarland said in a separate statement to USNI News on Tuesday.

“These are the discussions we have been having with the Hill and we look forward to continuing these discussions regarding our plan.”

Next Steps

The Navy is now balancing how it can upgrade the ships quickly and meet COCOM demand for BMD ships.

Under the new Aegis modernization plan, N96 is looking to wring out cost savings by creating more standardized versions of DDG Aegis systems and software between the two versions.

“We want to get down to two baselines,” Kilby said.

“You’re either in the COTS family or the MILSPEC family and that one will make life easier from a maintenance standpoint, a school’s standpoint and a cost standpoint.”

N96 has completed the HM&E upgrades to ten Flight I and II ships and currently has USS Barry(DDG-52) and USS Benfold (DDG-65) undergoing a full Baseline 9 upgrade.

Three other ships – USS Russell (DDG-59), USS Curtis Wilbur (DDG-54) and USS The Sullivans (DDG-68) – are moving through the MILSPEC path.

Strapped for cash, the officials at N96 say that current two-tied approach is the most cost effective way forward to strike the balance without relief from the sequestration cuts.

“We’re making these ships more capable,” Kilby said,

“We think it’s a reasonable approach.”

http://news.usni.org/2014/06/03/navy-altered-destroyer-upgrade-plan-due-budget-pressure-demand-ships

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In Era Of Tight Budgets, How Many Aircraft Carriers Are Enough?

(STARS AND STRIPES 08 JUN 14) ... Jon Harper

WASHINGTON – Aircraft carriers are perhaps the most powerful expression of U.S. military might. They’re also expensive and potentially vulnerable. In an era of fiscal constraint, defense officials, lawmakers and the commander-in-chief must answer a question that could have enormous strategic consequences: How many are enough?

Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Chief of Naval Operations, believes he knows the answer.

“We need 11, when you add [combatant commander requirements] with the contingencies that we are tasked to respond to, in the time that we have to respond, and the capabilities that we have out there. ... And so when I look out into the future, we need at least 11 carriers,” he told reporters last month.

The Pentagon is considering retiring the carrier USS George Washington to save money if Congress doesn’t lift the budget caps imposed on the Defense Department. Such a move would cut the authorized carrier fleet from 11 to 10 ships.

“We would have to change the way we do presence and the way we think about contingency response if we go to 10 aircraft carriers,” Greenert said. In that scenario, according to the Navy chief, the U.S. would have to accept coverage gaps or change its force posture model.

The Navy aims to always have three carriers on station in the strategically vital regions of the Western Pacific and the Middle East. How those three carriers are divvied up among those areas depends on the security situation in both places.

Only a fraction of the fleet are at sea at any given time, due to maintenance and training.

With 11 carriers, the Navy can maintain an average of 3.5 carriers deployed, according to retired Vice Adm. Peter Daly, who commanded a carrier strike group. The average is higher than three because when one carrier is relieving another in an area of operations, there are more than three carriers at sea.

But with a 10-carrier fleet, that average number of carriers deployed drops to about 3.0, and there are times when fewer than three carriers are at sea, Daly said. With nine carriers, the deployment average drops to 2.5. Going down to eight would make it difficult to keep even two carriers deployed, according to Daly.

The effects of having fewer than 11 carriers are already being seen. Right now, the Navy has only 10 available because the USS Enterprise was retired at the end of 2012, and its replacement, the USS Gerald R. Ford, won’t be ready until 2016 at the earliest. As a result, the U.S. won’t have a carrier based in Asia in late 2015 after the George Washington leaves Japan and sails to Virginia to prepare for an overhaul, according to the Navy. The USS Ronald Reagan will eventually move to Japan, but Navy officials would not provide specific time lines for when that will happen.

“You’d have massive gaps in coverage,” Daly said.

Outside analysts are not as reluctant to ax the flattops. During a recent budget and force planning exercise conducting by four Washington think tanks, the teams proposed cutting two to four carriers over the next 10 years. In a tight fiscal environment, the think tank analysts saw reducing the number of carriers as preferable to putting other military capabilities on the chopping block.

A High Price

The carrier’s price tag is indeed high. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year to operate a carrier strike group, and the newest carrier – the USS Gerald R. Ford – cost approximately $13 billion to procure.

Todd Harrison of one of the participating think tanks, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, described carrier-cutting proposals as “the least worse alternative given the [budget] constraints.” But he noted that each team proposed cutting the same number of carriers under both a full-sequestration budget cap scenario and a more generous half-sequestration budget cap scenario.

“That indicates that these decisions in each team were not necessarily [totally] budget driven,” Harrison said at a conference when the results of the exercise were unveiled earlier this year.

Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst David Berteau told conference attendees that his proposal to cut three carriers from the fleet over the next decade was based on an assumption that there would still be a forward deployment capability that provided the same coverage that the Navy has today.

Greenert contends that trying to maintain the same coverage with fewer carriers by instituting longer deployments and doing less maintenance would be counterproductive.

“Some folks say, ‘Well, deployments will just be longer.’ I say not necessarily, [because] there’s a limit to that. There’s an optimal response that you can provide that would be to come back and you do maintenance and train again and go out there. And we have to take care of our sailors … and the equipment. So if you just turn the crank faster, for lack of a better term, in the cycle of deployment, the ship gets older faster [and] the uranium burns out faster [and] you don’t get [to keep the ship in service] for 50 years,” according to the Navy chief.

Daly said carrier deployments typically last seven or eight months nowadays, which is sustainable (although six-month deployment would be ideal), but extending that time line would result in excessive wear and tear on the flight decks, making the surface more dangerous for aviators and crew members. It would also place too much stress on sailors, according to Daly.

“If you get north of eight months, it starts to break down … It has a bad impact on families, and eventually this will come around on us [especially when the economy improves],” he said. “It’s unrealistic to think that we’d have the retention we have today.”

Skepticism about the need to maintain 11 carriers is not limited to those outside DoD. In 2010, then Defense Secretary Robert Gates called into question the need to have that many, given the nature of the threats posed by other powers.

“The need to project power across the oceans will never go away. But consider the massive overmatch the U.S. already enjoys. Consider, too, the growing anti-ship capabilities of adversaries. Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?” Gates asked a Navy League audience at the time.

But Daly said sizing the fleet simply based on the number of carriers that other countries possess is a flawed methodology because the American Navy doesn’t just fight other navies; in wartime, carriers are used as a platform from which planes attack targets ashore, like they have throughout the war in Afghanistan in support of U.S. troops on the battlefield. Carriers also offer advantages over overseas air bases because they are more difficult to target and they don’t require the U.S. to get a “permission slip” from other governments to launch airstrikes from their soil, Daly noted.

Critics also argue that emerging anti-ship missiles, especially China’s DF-21D ballistic missile, are making carriers obsolete as the U.S. military pivots towards Asia. The DF-21D – sometimes referred to as the “carrier killer” – has a reported range of nearly 1,100 miles, whereas the carrier variant of the new Joint Strike Fighter can’t fly more than 700 miles without being refueled. That means, getting the service’s premier manned aircraft of the future within striking distance of Chinese territory would require an American carrier to get within range of China’s advanced anti-ship missiles.

“The aircraft carrier is in danger of becoming like the battleships [of the World War II era]: big, expensive, vulnerable – and surprisingly irrelevant to the conflicts of our time … [But] the national security establishment, the White House, the Department of Defense and Congress persist [with buying carriers] despite clear evidence that the carrier equipped with manned strike aircraft is an increasingly expensive way to deliver firepower, and that carriers themselves may not be able to move close enough to targets to operate effectively or survive in an era of satellite imagery and long-range precision strike missiles,” Navy Capt. Henry Hendrix wrote in a paper published by the Center for a New American Security last year.

By Hendrix’s calculation, for the amount of money that the U.S. Navy spends to procure a new carrier, the Chinese military could buy more than 1,200 DF-21Ds to saturate carrier strike groups’ defensive systems.

“The risk of a carrier suffering a mission kill that takes it off the battle line without actually sinking it remains high,” according to Hendrix.

Hendrix recommends investing more in advanced conventional missiles such as the Tomahawk that can be fired from stealthy submarines, which are much harder to target than carriers. He would phase out the existing carriers.

“Money is tight, and as the nautical saying goes, the enemy has found our range. It is time to change course,” he wrote.

But Daly argues it’s illogical to abandon a major weapons platform just because an enemy is developing a weapon to counter it.

“When people bring up the DF-21D and say, wow, here’s one thing that one group says they built, it’d be like saying, ‘Well, somebody somewhere developed an anti-tank weapon, so now the world can’t have tanks’ … We have fixed air bases ashore whose GPS coordinate are known down to 20 significant digits, and somehow that’s a better alternative than an aircraft carrier that’s mobile and moves around at sea and is protected by multiple defense-in-depth systems? That’s kind of crazy if you ask me,” Daly said. “[It’s like saying], ‘Somebody invented the AK-47, so now we shouldn’t have soldiers because they might be hit by this weapon.’ It’s just bizarre.”

Greenert said the Navy has “lots of intelligence” on the DF-21D, and the service is developing countermeasures to protect its carriers.

“It’s a good weapon that they’ve developed. But there’s nothing that doesn’t have vulnerabilities, and we continue to pursue ideas in that regard … We’re working quite feverishly on that, and I’m pretty comfortable with where we can operate our carriers,” Greenert told reporters, while declining to provide details about the steps the U.S. is taking to thwart the Chinese missiles.

When it comes to the size of the fleet, Greenert said 11 carriers is “enough” to get the job done. Others say the Navy needs even more.

“We’re an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world,” Rear Adm. Thomas Moore, the service’s program executive officer for aircraft carriers, said last year.

Given defense budget constraints, it’s unlikely that the Navy will be able to field more than 11 in the foreseeable future. But going below is 11 is currently prohibited by Congress, and a powerful group of lawmakers, industry lobbyists and seapower advocates stand in the way of that prohibition being lifted. So regardless of whether an 11-carrier fleet is too big, too small, or just enough, it is the reality that the Navy will probably have to live with.

http://www.stripes.com/news/in-era-of-tight-budgets-how-many-aircraft-carriers-are-enough-1.287563

 

Lockheed Martin’s LCS Follow-On Could Subtract A Helicopter, Executive Says

(DEFENSE DAILY 09 JUN 14) ... Mike McCarthy

Lockheed Martin’s offering to the Navy for the follow-on Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) to meet the small surface combatant requirement could remove one of two MH-60 helicopters currently meant to operate off the ship to make room for a vertical launch system, a company executive said Monday.

The Lockheed Martin variant of the LCS known as the Freedom does not have a vertical launch system for firing missiles. As part of the Navy’s review of the LCS program, the company responded to an April request for information (RFI) that included the option of adding anywhere from four to 32 launch cells to the ship to increase firepower.

Joe North, the vice president of Lockheed Martin littoral ship systems, told reporters that if all 32 cells are added to the aft portion of the ship, it would require the subtraction of one of the helicopters for performing anti-submarine and anti-sea mine missions. He added, however, that shifting at least eight cells to the front end would allow the Navy to keep both helicopters on the vessel.

The scenarios apply if the Navy sticks with the Freedom hull at its current length of 118 meters, but North pointed out that Lockheed Martin also presented the Navy with the option of lengthening the mono-hulled Freedom variant.

The Navy on April 30 asked companies to submit ideas for a small surface combatant follow-on to LCS after Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s decision to reduce the LCS buys from the planned 52 to 32. Hagel questioned the survivability and lethality of the ship-class and instructed the Navy to examine alternatives to meet the small warship requirement.

Hagel’s directive also applied to the trimaran Independence variant built by Austal USA, which along with Lockheed Martin and other companies replied in late May to the Navy’s two RFIs. Austal USA proposed a host of ways to increase the firepower on the vessel, including a vertical launch capability as well.

Both companies have been contracted to deliver a combined 24 ships, evenly split between the two variants.

The Navy has set up a task force that is due to reach a recommendation for the small surface combatant by July 31, and sought input from throughout the industry through the RFIs. General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls Industries and Raytheon were among the other companies that submitted ideas for either hull designs or combat systems-or both.

http://www.defensedaily.com/lockheed-martins-lcs-follow-on-could-subtract-a-helicopter-executive-says/

 

Tricky Waters Of Comparing Shipbuilding Costs

(DEFENSE NEWS 16 JUN 14) ... Robert Holzer

As the U.S. Navy’s Small Surface Combatant Task Force presses ahead to develop future ship options, the issue of comparative shipbuilding costs continues to raise concerns. This is particularly the case when attempting to compare costs between different types and classes of warships, sometimes acquired decades apart.

While it seems simple enough, in actuality it is very difficult to do correctly. Failure to fully understand this issue could lead to a kind of actuarial sea blindness.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert stood up the task force following Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s decision to buy only 32 littoral combat ships, while directing the Navy to develop new options for a small surface combatant. Options publicly identified include continuing LCS as is, buying an upgraded version of existing LCS designs or building a new ship. The task force’s conclusions are due in July.

The issue of cost, more specifically life-cycle costs, is playing a huge role in the task force’s deliberations.

I am not a cost expert, but in talks with skilled practitioners of this arcane science, I have come away with several key truisms that seem to animate every discussion. These keys are not limited to the surface combatant task force’s work, but can be applied to the numerous other agencies, entities and research groups conducting separate reviews, reports and assessments of other Navy shipbuilding efforts.

Cost differences between old and new ship classes are huge and potentially misleading. The easiest course of action is to attempt to compare one ship class versus another class based simply on raw budget numbers. This leads to flawed analysis on several levels.

First, it ignores the time-value of money or shipbuilding inflation that often outpaces other sectors of the economy. That is why naval analysts at the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Service are careful to compare ship costs in a common fiscal-year framework to all ships.

Second, new ships are burdened by higher costs and smaller datasets when compared with legacy ship classes. This is far more than an apples-to-oranges comparison. It’s more akin to comparing apples to anchors.

For example, comparing early LCS life-cycle costs and future cost projections to the mature Oliver Hazard Perry-class FFG 7 frigates will yield badly skewed results. The Perry-class frigates joined the fleet between 1977 and 1989 and have well-established and documented maintenance, support and training pipelines based on decades of steady use and “tweaking.” Moreover, these costs are accounted for by the budgets for Regional Maintenance Centers, the fleet or other maintenance entities, which appear to significantly lower the life-cycle costs for in-service frigates compared to ships like LCS, which is just joining the operating forces.

Finally, the lead-ship cost premium, which is often substantial, is not usually included in the life-cycle costs of older ships since that cost had long been amortized by follow-on ships.

LCS, on the other hand, being a new class is programmatically burdened by the early start-up costs for all of its maintenance, sustainment, training and support, which is spread only across the few ships deployed. This program situation significantly increases its apparent life-cycle costs. The Navy’s LCS program also bears the current lead-ship research-and-development costs for two separate ship designs.

Accounting for total costs between ship classes is difficult. The differences between the total amount of data available between legacy and new ship classes can be significant and how that information is used or interpreted can also yield false conclusions. Legacy class ships, like the Navy’s CG 47 Ticonderoga-class cruisers, for example, no longer have many of the myriad maintenance and modernization costs contained within their operations and sustainment budget.

Critical pieces such as development of the Aegis combat system, its procurement, successive baseline improvements and training are accounted for in separate budgets. Much of the maintenance support is likewise budgeted for in separate Navy accounts that are not reflected in the CG 47 classes’ total life-cycle costs. As a result, the life-cycle costs for cruisers may appear to be much lower than what they actually are.

Impact of ship learning curves must be taken into account. It is not uncommon for the fifth (or tenth, for that matter) ship of a class to experience a significant decrease in the number of man-hours required to deliver a ship to the Navy, all other elements (e.g., design alterations) held constant. Comparing the life-cycle costs for a mature ship class well into its acquisition (if not decommissioning) phase versus a new construction shipbuilding program will make the new ship appear vastly more expensive than it truly is.

This same equation also applies to shipbuilding programs, like the DDG 51, which is now into an improved Flight IIA version, where virtually all first-ship-of class costs have been captured by Flight I ships and no longer are “counted” by some accounting practices.

In addition, the cost of Flight IIA ships now with more than 30 hulls of experience have all but averaged-out costs that new programs such as LCS are still incurring as they advance along the shipbuilding learning curve. All of the start-up costs for new programs like testing and training, infrastructure, military construction and training simulators have likewise been amortized over more ships and a longer time frame when compared to new ship starts.

Defense acquisition is always complicated and naval shipbuilding is an incredibly complex process. The late-Rear Adm. Wayne E. Meyer, the “father” of Aegis, frequently noted that nothing, not even the Space Shuttle, was as difficult as building a warship. A successful shipbuilding program requires the minute orchestration of millions of different parts and materials to integrate these disparate parts into a warship. The same discipline, accuracy and precision are similarly needed for ship costs. Comparing apples to anchors is not an acceptable standard.

Robert Holzer is a Senior National Security Manager with Gryphon Technologies.

http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140616/DEFFEAT05/306160019/Commentary-Tricky-Waters-Comparing-Shipbuilding-Costs

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Navy Engineers LCS Changes

(DOD BUZZ 27 JUN 14) ... Kris Osborn

The Navy is implementing specific design and engineering improvements to its Littoral Combat Ship following the construction of the first two vessels, the Freedom and the Independence.

The changes to LCS span a range of areas from adjustments to water jets to efforts to fight corrosion and improve the ships elevators, deck extensions and inflatable rafts.

Vice Adm. Willy Hilarides, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, said the first two LCS ships were built with a specific mind to continued development of the platform for the long term.

“We forget that we decided to take LCS 1 and 2 and deliver them as ships to the fleet, long before the design was mature – so that we design the right class of ships for the long term,” Hilarides said. “There are 10 to 12 big changes to the ships that are in place. That is what we intended to do.”

The Navy plans to build and acquire as many as 32 of the controversial shallow-water, multi-mission ships engineered for surface warfare, countermine warfare and anti-submarine warfare. The LCS has come under fire from lawmakers, analysts and even members of the Navy for not sufficiently meeting mission requirements or being survivable enough to withstand anticipated threats.

However, proponents of the platform have long maintained the ship brings substantial mission-enhancing technologies to the Navy. Most of all, they say the platform has been engineered to adapt, meaning it is built to accommodate new technologies as they emerge.

The LCS class consists of two variants, the Freedom and Independence – designed and built by two industry teams led by Lockheed Martin and an Austal USA-led team. Contracts were awarded to Lockheed Martin and Austal USA on December 29, 2010, for the construction of up to 10 ships each.

So far, the first four ships have been commissioned with the fourth, the USS Coronado, being commissioned in April, Naval Sea Systems Command officials said. LCS 5 and 6 launched in December of last year, and ships 7 through 16 are in some stage of production, Navy spokesman Matthew Leonard added.

The Navy hopes to build as many as three LCS per year, however that remains unclear in light of Congressional mark-ups of the budget, some of which have lowered the amount to two per year.

Some of the improvements to the Freedom variant of the LCS emerged as a result of experiences on-board the Freedom during its recent deployment. Identifying and fixing problems with the ship is part of what the deployment was designed to accomplish, Hilarides explained.

The Freedom experienced problems with its ship service diesel generators, or SSDGs, which resulted in a temporary power outage during a trip to Guam in the summer of last year. The ship also experienced problems with a corroded cable and faulty air compressor, Navy officials added.

Overall, LCS 1 continues to receive a series of modifications which will improve the USS Freedom as well as the remaining LCS Freedom – class ships now being built and developed.

One such change resulted in what’s called an anchor windlass replacement, said Naval Sea Systems Command spokesman Dale Eng.

“To prevent water ingestion in the anchor windlass room, the existing anchor winch, hydraulic unit and mooring capstan were replaced with a single electric capstan (chain) winch on the main deck. In addition, the existing towing chain was replaced with a lighter chain,” he said.

Also, to improve corrosion protection, the ship’s Impressed Current Cathodic Protection system was modified by adding protections to the water jet inlet tunnel; Cathodic Protection is a technique used to control or minimize the corrosion of a metal surface. This change, designed to improve reliability and maintainability, was put into effect on LCS 3, LCS 5 and follow on ships, Eng said.

Other changes put into effect starting on LCS 3 include the lengthening of the stern transom and the integration of the buoyancy tanks into the stern of the hull. The transom stern is the bottom tip of the surface of the stern that approximates the waterline.

“These changes increase the weight service life margin and enhance the ship’s stability characteristics,” Eng added.

The ship’s water jets were modified as well, changing from a mixed flow design to an axial flow in order to reduce cavitation (air pockets) and improve efficiency. With an axial flow, water is pushed in a direction parallel to the shaft of the impeller, a type of propeller.

The end result of implementation of the axial flow water jets is improved operation efficiency with reduced maintenance intervals, Eng said.

Also on the Freedom variant of the LCS, engineers have moved to a significantly less complex gas turbine electric start system on LCS 5, in order to reduce costs and lower ship weight, he added.

There have been substantial changes to the Independence variants of the LCS as well, including the installation of what’s called bridge wings, narrow walkway extensions designed to improve safety.

Also, the 5.1 meter Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat, or RHIB, on the Independence variant was replaced with a Navy standard 7 meter RHIB. The new Navy RHIB is designed to provide improved performance and supportability, Eng said. The change was made to LCS 4 and follow on ships in the fleet.

Similar to their Freedom variant counterparts, the Independence-class ships of the LCS are also getting an improved cathodic protection system designed to combat corrosion. This effort is being built onto LCS 4 and follow-on Independence variant ships.

The Independence-variant ships are also getting upgraded water jets quite similar to their Freedom counterparts. The jets are being upgraded to handle the horsepower provided by the gas turbine, Eng said.

The Navy is also improving the anchor on the Independence ships through what’s called the winch control system, an effort to modulate the motion of the anchor and reduce the reliance on manual hand brakes.

“The variable control will make it safer to operate for the crew and the equipment. Other changes enhanced the ability to safely spool anchor cable and have reduced the wear on the ship’s bolster and anchor winch,” Eng added.

The Independence variant has also redesigned the mission bay side door of the ship to improve reliability and reconfigured the platform lift elevator such that it can better handle weapons and ordnance, Eng said.

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2014/06/27/navy-engineers-lcs-changes/