Taking on LockMart

Coast Guard commandant Admiral Thad Allen has all but surrendered to critics who’ve been saying that the service’s sprawling $24-billion Deepwater modernization program is fatally flawed and rife with corruption, according to The New York Times:

“We have been running some parts of the Coast Guard like a small business when we are a Fortune 500 company,” Admiral Allen said in a speech on Tuesday to several hundred Coast Guard officials. “We need to evolve with changing times.” A new deputy commandant for mission support will oversee the design, acquisition and construction of new ships and aircraft and the maintenance of the fleet once they are built, functions that are now managed separately.

That will allow the Coast Guard to avoid giving so much authority for design and construction choices to contractors, like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which renovated the first eight trouble-plagued ships in the Deepwater program.

The boats in question are the 123-foot Island-class patrol boats first fielded more than 15 years ago. Last year, former Lockheed Martin engineer Mike DeKort called out the firm for allegedly botching improvements to the boats’ communications. A report from the Coast Guard Inspector General this week confirms some of the flaws, including bad wiring and leaky system security.

The eight boats were withdrawn from service a couple months ago, causing a minor panic in a service that was already short of patrol boats as it awaits the introduction of two classes of brand-new boats over the next decade.

In an email on Tuesday, DeKort declared victory:

The ICGS [partnership between Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman] parties involved have demonstrated themselves to be incompetent and ethically, technically and professionally bankrupt. Also – the IG told me very clearly that the CG and LM were not cooperating with their investigation. They could not get data they asked for or run re-tests they asked for.

But read the IG report carefully:

Aspects of the C4ISR equipment installed aboard the 123′ cutters do not meet the design standards set forth in the Deepwater contract. Specifically, two of the four areas of concern identified by the complainant were substantiated and are the result of the contractor not complying with the design standards identified in the Deepwater contract. For example, the contractor did not install low smoke cabling aboard the 123' cutter, despite a Deepwater contract requirement that stated, “all shipboard cable added as a result of the modification to the vessel shall be low smoke.” The intent of this requirement was to eliminate the polyvinyl chloride jacket encasing the cables, which for years produced toxic fumes and dense smoke during shipboard fire. Additionally, the contractor installed C4ISR topside equipment aboard both the 123' cutters and prosecutors, which either did not comply or was not tested to ensure compliance with specific environmental performance requirements outlined in the Deepwater contract.

Honestly, these are relatively minor complaints. And bear in mind that the boats were withdrawn from service due to hull buckling, not due to the problems DeKort pointed out. Before the buckling became apparent, the first couple modernized boats actually performed quite well, according to one former crewman, Master Chief Eric Gallett. He dismissed DeKort’s allegations as missing the point. The boats’ major strengths were their networked computers.

As for the hull buckling … these boats were designed to last 15 years. And they did. The Coast Guard ran into problems when it tried to keep the boats past their intended service life. Keeping an aged fleet afloat while awaiting new ships is one of the service’s major challenges, as I describe in the current issue of Defense Technology International:

At the Coast Guard Yard in southern Maryland, the [Deepwater] revolution seems a long way off, and the rust is right in your face. At this 108-year-old facility, the Coast Guard’s only government-owned shipyard, 400 workers commanded by Captain Steve Duca gut, repair then piece back together the service’s aging medium cutters and patrol boats, keeping them afloat and livable until they can be replaced with ships like Bertholf. Duca’s is delicate work – “like surgery,” he says. And it’s increasingly urgent. With more than 80 cutters larger than 100 feet, the Coast Guard has the world’s 12th-largest navy. But its fleet is, on average, around a quarter-century old, making it the 38th oldest of the world’s 40 largest navies. Deepwater has suffered delays. The last new ships and aircraft won’t join the force for another two decades, several years later than originally planned. So an old fleet is just getting older.

I’m not one to stand by defense contractors just for the Hell of it. When they’re wrong, they’re wrong. But in this case, Lockheed Martin is guilty only of minor crimes. But these crimes have been blown out of proportion by critics. The 123s worked just fine before their ancient hulls gave out. But when these hulls did give out, folks like DeKort saw an opportunity to attack the contractors. And that’s just not fair.

--David Axe, cross-posted at War Is Boring

In Deep

“May God bless this ship and all who sail in her,” said Meryl Chertoff, wife of Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, as she cracked a bottle of Champagne on the towering bow of U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf at the Northrop Grumman shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi in November.
The newly-christened Bertholf, the first of the so-called National Security Cutters, is the product of two defense giants’ controversial coupling and the biggest piece yet of a sprawling service-wide modernization program. In 2001, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin formed a joint venture, Integrated Coast Guard Systems, to win the then-$11-billion Deepwater contract to replace most of the Coast Guards’ ships, aircraft and command systems. Since then, Deepwater’s cost has ballooned to $24 billion for 90 new ships and 200 aircraft.
Perhaps worst, the program’s much-needed modernized small cutters have proved to be a total wash. Fixating on these leaky, over-budget 123-foot boats, critics in Congress have assailed the joint venture. U.S. Representative Bob Filner (D-Calif) even characterized the firms’ allegedly shoddy work as “criminal if not treasonous.”
But critics have ignored the successes of other Deepwater designs and perhaps miss the point of the partnership. Integrated Coast Guard Systems is the lead systems integrator on Deepwater, but it farms out work on many of the individual cutter and aircraft designs to other companies. Northrop Grumman is building the big cutters and four Global Hawk drones, but other firms are responsible for scores of smaller cutters, short-range boats and vertical-takeoff drones.
EADS provided kits for helicopter upgrades and has delivered the first of 36 HC-144 patrol planes based on its C-235 transport. Lockheed Martin handles upgrades to the service’s HC-130 Hercules patrol planes as well as much of Deepwater’s electronics, but General Dynamics contributes key parts of the latter. To Integrated Coast Guard Systems, platforms are secondary to integration, to the network that links the platforms together. And that network, more than any new ship or airplane, promises to eventually revolutionize the U.S. Coast Guard, assuming the service’s fleet hasn’t rusted away to nothing in the meantime.
But that's a big if. Read the rest of the story in the latest issue of Defense Technology International. Pics here.

--David Axe, cross-posted at War Is Boring and Ares

You're Fired!

Navy chief Admiral Mike Mullen has fired the captain overseeing the Littoral Combat Ship program, Defense News reports:

Capt. Donald Babcock, the Navy’s LCS program manager, was relieved of his duties Jan. 29 by his boss, Rear Adm. Charles Hamilton – who also is being reassigned. Hamilton relieved Babcock due to “loss of confidence in his ability to command,” according to a Navy source, who added that Babcock would be reassigned to “administrative duties.”

Both men got their pink slips after an audit revealed that the Lockheed Martin version of the LCS would come in at around $400 million, nearly double the target cost. Two weeks ago the Navy suspended work on the second LockMart LCS for 90 days, long enough to get new managers in place and, hopefully, put the fear of God in Lockheed Martin.

With 55 ships planned, the LCS is a lynchpin of the Navy's future fleet. The class is designed to work close to shore at high speeds and to carry "modular" weapons and sensors packets to enable it to swing between missions. The idea was to populate coastal waters with large numbers of LCSs anchored by a Zumwalt-class land-attack destroyer. But that concept is in jeopardy if the Navy can't keep down costs on both ships. Already the first Zumwalt is careening towards a $3-billion pricetag. Toss in cost overruns on the LCS and the Navy's future surface fleet is dead in the water.

Far from being discouraged, naval analyst Bob Work sees the pink slips and the work stoppage as positive signs. "The Navy needed to say it had a problem. The second thing they had to say was that we have to build affordable ships. Mullen has shown that he is dead serious about doing that."

--David Axe, cross-posted at Ares and War Is Boring

Size Doesn't Matter, Part One

The new chair of the House Armed Services Committee’s sea-power subcommittee is calling for a bigger Navy fleet. “Numbers do matter,” Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss, said last week. Taylor’s district includes major shipyards. Noting that the Navy has shed around 50 major warships under the Bush Administration, Taylor added, “I want to turn that around.”

Taylor is not the first admiral, wonk or elected official to lament an apparent erosion of the Navy’s strength. Problem is that Taylor, like many others, is fixated on numbers of ships, which these days is one of the least reliable metrics for quantifying naval power. In fact, today’s Navy, while operating fewer warships than at any time since the 1930s, remains more powerful than the next 17 largest navies combined -- a “17-navy standard.” This is the greatest margin of superiority in modern history. The 19^th-century British Royal Navy, the world’s previous great naval power, was only slightly larger than its nearest competitor the French navy. What’s more, our 17-navy-standard lead is probably going to grow in coming years.

And it only grows further if you count ships operated by other U.S. services including the Coast Guard, Military Sealift Command and the Army. The Coast Guard alone has embarked on an expansion that will transform it into one of the world’s top 15 navies. Military Sealift Command operates the majority of the world’s large sealift ships.

Today’s numbers game started in the 1980s with President Ronald Reagan’s 600-ship buildup plan. We never quite got there, and post-Cold War cuts resulted in a shrinking force, which alarmed Navy types and resulted in the first of several plans establishing a minimum number of ships. The 1992 Base-Force plan called for 450 major combatants. But aging ships, rising shipbuilding costs and the 1990s “procurement holiday” steadily eroded numbers. “In 1997, the Navy said we’ve got to establish a floor and that’s going to be 300 ships,” says Robert Work, senior defense analyst at Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “So the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review says we’ve got have 300 ships.”

That’s slightly more that what we’ve got right now, if you count only major Navy warships. The problem, Work says, is that “the Navy was psychologically incapable of accepting that number.”

Why? Because of tradition, a very powerful force in today’s U.S. military.

“There was thing called the TSBF -- the Total Ship Battle Force,”
Work explains. “It has an old history in navy-versus-navy conflicts,
where attrition was high and numbers were very important. From 1890 to
now, the Navy has followed the TSBF.”

Obsessed with numbers, in 1997 the service and its congressional and
think-tank allies launched a campaign to grow the fleet. Recent plans
for 375 ships gave way to a more realistic total of 313 endorsed by
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Mullen. Critics such as Taylor
seem to think even that number is too low. But those 313 ships would
mean an only slight improvement to our current superiority over every
other navy in the world.

And here’s why: due to huge advancements in weapons, sensors and
aircraft, today’s fleet carries more missiles than ever, can launch
more aircraft sorties than ever and has brand-new capabilities that no
earlier fleet has possessed. Plus, today's ships are big -- much bigger than past ships.

In subsequent posts, we’ll take a look at all the reasons why
today’s U.S. Navy is more powerful than ever, and probably does not
need to grow or get more money. Part two will address the “Vertical
Launch System revolution.”

Cross-posted at War Is Boring and Ares

Shorline Fighter Runs Aground

Not too long ago, the Littoral Combat Ship was looking like the cornerstone of the U.S. Navy's future: a 400-foot, reconfigurable ship that could chase terrorists, hunt for mines, and scout for subs in coastal waters all around the world. Best of all, the LCS was cheap -- the main ship would cost about $220 million. So the Navy could afford to buy 55 of them, making up the biggest component of the planned 313-ship fleet.

But now, LCS is running into serious problems. So serious, the Navy has ordered Lockheed Martin to stop work on one of the two LCSs the company is building, Navy Times reports. The order, which lasts 90 days, came after estimates for the ship jumped from $220 million to between $331 million and $410 million.

The increase is related to "contractor poor performance" and increased labor costs, Navy spokesman Lt. John Gay tells the Washington Post.

For example, a key part of the propulsion system was delayed 27 weeks because of a manufacturing error, driving up costs, he said...

The order applies to the second of two vessels that Lockheed is building for the Navy. Work on the first one, which is 70 percent completed, is to continue so the Navy can launch it and evaluate the design...

While it is not uncommon for the cost of the first versions of a new line of ships to increase, Lockheed knew the requirements, Gay said. "It remained unchanged, that is why we are concerned," he said.

Lockheed acknowledged a problem with a part related to the propulsion system, saying it had been cut incorrectly by a subcontractor, but the company also blamed changes the Navy made to the way the ship was to be constructed and a shortage of the kind of steel it required...

A Navy official was unavailable last night to respond to Lockheed's claims, but earlier said steel-related cost issues already had been accounted for.

The cost of stopping and restarting the program could be about $14 million, Quigley said, adding that Lockheed is likely to attempt to recoup those costs from the Navy.

General Dynamics, which is building a pair of its own LCSs -- with a radically different, trimaran design isn't affected by the stop-work order, Navy Times notes.

But the price of GD’s first ship also is rising, although one source claimed the price for the first GD ship remains well under $300 million, and that “the estimate for the second GD ship will be around $240 million to $250 million.”

...A similar cost review will be performed on the General Dynamics ship.

The news comes about a week after the Navy reassigned its admiral in charge of ship-building, Charles Hamilton, to a new position. According to Navy Times, "sources said the reassignment was not due solely to problems with the Littoral Combat Ship."

Aegis Turns 20

Some weapons don't age well. Designed to counter the threat of the day, they go into mothballs when the threat evaporates. Take the Bradley Linebacker, an M-2 Bradely infantry fighting vehicle with a Stinger anti-air missile module attached to the turrent. The Linebacker was designed to protect armored formations against Soviet attack jets and helicopters. Well, the Soviet Union went away in 1989 and the Bradley Linebacker lasted just a few years before the Army began stripping off the Stingers and returning them to their original role hauling troops.

Other weapons just keep on ticking, years or decades past their planned expiration date. The Boeing B-52 is still our primary bomber 50 years after its introduction. The Vietnam-era M-14 rifle has enjoyed a recent revival for squad marksmen in Iraq. And the Navy's Aegis radar, built by Lockheed Martin and designed to defend aircraft carriers from Soviet missile attacks, has reached 20 years and 100 units delivered, as I describe over at Military.com. These days the powerful radar (the stop-sign-shaped thingy on the pictured cruiser's superstructure) has taken on roles in the littorals and against ballistic missiles. In fact, of all our ballistic missile defense systems, Aegis coupled with the Raytheon SM-3 missile is the only one that works consistently.

The key to Aegis' longevity is its raw power and smart program management. Aegis did incremental "spiral development" years before that was a Pentagon standard. And Aegis has adopted a commercial open architecture in order to keep up with rapid advancements in computing:

Engineers at [Lockheed Martin's] Moorestown [facility in New Jersey] have been ripping out Aegis' traditional military-grade computers and replacing them with cheaper, faster commercial computers such as IBM's Blade server. Going to so-called "commercial off-the-shelf" computers means Aegis can be upgraded every time IBM comes out with a faster computer -- say, every two or three years. This helps the Navy keep up with the ever-increasing pace of technological development.

"We have not reached the limit of Aegis," [Aegis engineer Alan] Ostrow says.

-- David Axe

Lessons of the Dreadnought

John J. McKeon is the author of Demented Choirs, a novel set in 1905 during the building of HMS Dreadnought, the first revolutionary weapons system of the 20th century. This is his first post for Defense Tech.

When a nation has a big technological lead over its potential military rivals, how long can that lead be expected to last?

The United States enjoys such an edge today, with no other nation either willing or able to compete in firepower, communications or mobility. Other nations, at other times, have occupied similarly advanced positions.

History suggests these advantages don’t last long, and pursuing them can lead to unexpected places. For example:

It was in search of just such a long-lived war-fighting advantage that Great Britain set out in 1905 to build what was then the most extraordinary weapon in the world, the great battleship HMS Dreadnought.

Britain built Dreadnought in secrecy and with unprecedented speed. The haste itself was a signal to Imperial Germany that His Majesty could build more and bigger ships, and build them faster, than the Kaiser. In addition, German warships had to traverse the Kiel canal to reach open water, and bigger ships, with deeper drafts, could not do so.

If Germany wanted to keep pace, she would have to widen and deepen the canal, which would -- in theory -- make it cripplingly expensive to join in an arms race.

Dreadnought was the first "all big gun" ship; carrying ten 12-inch guns mounted in five turrets of a new design. Two were "wing turrets" on either side, another innovation. Dreadnought's propulsion system was also novel, and required by the emphasis her designers placed on speed.

Those designers forsook heavy iron plate armor, opting for lighter weight. "Speed is armor," said Admiral Jacky Fisher, then First Sea Lord and the driving force behind the modernization of the British navy. Dreadnought would simply outrun any other vessel it might encounter, and lob 850 pound shells from well out of the enemy’s firing range.

"Three 12-inch shells bursting on board every minute would be HELL!" Fisher declared.

New generations of American naval vessels, like the Zumwalt-class destroyers, put considerable emphasis on assets like radar-invisibility rather than the old, Industrial Revolution mantra of bigger/faster. Moreover, naval designers these days are creating platforms intended to evolve with new technology, rather than merely freezing in place the advantages of the moment.

Dreadnought gave its name to a whole class of ships, which soon included German vessels as well as British, Japanese and American. But Dreadnought itself was rapidly eclipsed. Within a decade after 1905, Britain had built more than 30 ships larger than Dreadnought, and Germany had built 28.

By August 1914, when Europe came to the precipice of war and leaped off, Dreadnought was already a relic.

-- John J. McKeon

Behind the Kitty Hawk Incident (Updated)

Several readers have given me all kinds of grief for not posting about the USS Kitty Hawk incident. My apologies -- I didn't feel like I had a whole lot to add to the story, about a Chinese Song-class sub shadowing an American carrier group.

The In From the Cold intel blog has some insights, however. "Spook86" notes that America's sub-detection capabilities have been on the decline for a while, now.

With the collapse of the old Soviet Navy in the early 1990s, the USN [U.S. Navy] began to de-emphasize its ASW [anti-submarine warfare] capabilities, figuring that the preeminent submarine threat had essentially evaporated, and it would take years -- perhaps decades -- for a similar challenge to emerge.

But Rear Admiral Hank McKinney, the former commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's submarine force, tells us not to be to hard on the sub-hunters:

Noah, I have no inside information on this event, but it is very difficult to detect a quiet diesel submarine and the Song-class submarines are quality submarines. Operating in international waters in the vicinity of a US battle group is perfectly normal -- good operational training.

The Chinese very well could have staged this event to make a point about the vulnerability of the Battle Group to submarine attack. The US Navy is fully aware of [those] vulnerabilities...

The Chinese are building a credible submarine force which will make it very difficult for the US Navy to maintain sea control dominance in or near coastal waters off of China.

McKinney concludes with a question: Did the Chinese "stage this event" to coincide with Adm. Gary Roughead's visit to China? Roughead currently serves as "CINCPACFLT" -- Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

(Big ups: Chuck)

UPDATE 11/15/06 11:25 AM: More from the Washington Times and In From the Cold.

UPDATE 11/15/06 11:50 AM: This will make China-hawks' heads explode. But the chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral William Fallon, says the incident highlights the need for closer Sino-American ties.

"There is a need to have a fundamental understanding," he said, adding that Admiral Gary Roughead, head of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was currently visiting China for the first naval exercise between the United States and the People's Liberation Army.

"This is the kind of thing that we must encourage and continue so we can move ahead from what I would characterize as kind of Cold War thinking and truly broaden the dialogue."

Meanwhile, as Brad notes in the comments, Barnett is yawning.

Defenseless Taiwan?

Taiwan has just commissioned its second and last pair of former U.S. Kidd-class destroyers, significantly boosting its naval surface power and improving its ability to repulse a Chinese amphibious assault. But according to Defense News, they likely represent the island nation's last major arms purchase for some time:

The commissioning comes as the United States, the island’s main arms supplier, increases pressure on parliament, in which the opposition has a slim majority, to pass a scaled down budget to buy more U.S. weapons. The budget has been bogged down in parliament for two years by opposition lawmakers who say the package, which would include eight diesel submarines, is too expensive and provocative.

In the 1980s and early '90s, Taiwan pulled way ahead of rival China in defense technology, especially in regards to aircraft and missiles. Taiwan even fielded its own light fighter design, the Ching-Kuo, and armed it with locally-built air-to-air missiles.

But as pro-Chinese politicians have gained power in Taiwan, defense modernization has faltered. Proposed purchases of submarines, Lockheed Martin P-3 Orion patrol planes and Patriot missiles have fallen by the wayside. Meanwhile, China has accelerated its own modernization with weapons designed for long-range operations and amphibious assaults ... as well as with massive numbers of ballistic missiles.

Taiwan is banking on some sort of peaceful reconciliation with China, while China quietly prepares to "reconcile" by force.

--David Axe

Deepwater Sinking?

A couple months ago, Lockheed whistleblower Mike DeKort prophesied the imminent unraveling of the Coast Guard's $25-billion Deepwater modernization effort due to contractor failures. Looks like he might have been right. Defense News reports that the centerpiece Fast Response Cutter, a Northrop Grumman-led program to field around 60 patrol boats for coastal rescue, has been put on hold due to design flaws:

The Coast Guard wants to build a total of 58 FRC cutters, which are badly needed to replace worn-out 110-foot cutters now in service. A previous plan to rebuild the 110-foot cutter fleet ended after the first converted ships developed serious hull integrity problems.

Northrop Grumman Ship Systems, Pascagoula, Miss., has strongly been pushing its composite design, to be built at its facility in Gulfport, Miss. The Coast Guard had earlier planned to order a prototype composite FRC cutter in 2006, but those plans are now on hold.

After two false starts, the Coast Guard "need[s] a patrol boat right away," says Rear Admiral Gary Blore, head of Deepwater. Defense News sketches some of the possibilities:

Blore noted that 19 international manufacturers with 27 different designs responded to a request for information put out in February to seek patrol boats that might meet Coast Guard requirements. None of the initial submissions met those requirements, Blore said, so the service modified some of its specifications. As a result, “five or six” of the designs show promise, Blore said.

The Coast Guard is looking for a vessel from 140 to 160 feet in length, Blore said — shorter than a number of the foreign designs. The FRC-B plan is based on a “parent-craft concept,” Blore explained, where the Coast Guard chooses a design, purchases construction rights, and builds the craft in the U.S. A similar approach, he noted, was used on the 110-foot Island-class cutters the FRC is intended to replace.

Under current plans, the Coast Guard could build 12 FRC-B cutters and 46 composite-hull FRC-A cutters, Blore said, although he allowed that those figures could change as composite craft are delivered and the program gains maturity.

-- David Axe

"Plug-and-Play" Ship Hits the Water

Navy Captain Don Babcock was in a hurry, when I met him earlier this year, in his office, tucked in a red-brick battleship shell factory along the Potomac River. Most people is his position, running big military development programs, tend to think in deadlines of approximates: a funding decision will come some time in the next few weeks, a test will happen some time in the spring, a system will be fielded in fiscal year 2009 - or was that 2010? Babcock, on the other hand, had a big, digital clock on his wall, detailing the exact number of days, minutes, hours, and seconds until his first Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS, would be commissioned.

The restless attitude seems to be paying off. The first LCS -- the "Freedom" -- was christened on Sunday. And that's a pretty major milestone for the Navy. Because the LCS is much, much different than anything in the American fleet today. Unlike the Navy's new DD(X) destroyer, the Freedom didn't cost billions to put together. And it's not planned for 1000 different kinds of missions, as a I noted in a Popular Mechanics article earlier this year:

Instead, each LCS will concentrate on a specific coastal mission: antisub warfare, mine clearance or ship-to-ship fights. Every LCS comes with a core crew of 40 and a weapons suite that includes a 57mm gun and missile interceptors. The boat is then customized with "mission modules" -- 40-ft. cargo containers, crammed with sonar arrays for sub-hunting, unmanned helicopters for surface warfare or robotic swimmers for minesweeping. The modules can be swapped out in less than a day. Then a second crew of about 35 comes on board to run the new machines. If the DD(X) is a 14,000-ton Swiss Army knife, then the LCS is a 3000-ton power drill-with interchangeable bits. "We're making a huge course change in the way we do business," Babcock says...

With a top speed of 45 knots or more, the LCSs will be fast enough to chase down terrorists in small boats. They're stealthy enough for effective reconnaissance. And, at about $400 million each, fully loaded -- about a tenth of the new destroyer's price -- the LCS is affordable enough for the Navy to send dozens of them skipping around the seas. It's a distributed, fast-moving response to a distributed, fast-moving foe.

Now, there a still a bunch of question marks surrounding the program. The basic shape, for instance. The Freedom looks like a speedboat on steriods. The second LCS, the Independence, will be a 419-foot trimaran. But the idea of building a cheap, adaptable, plug-and-play fleet that's future-proofed for uncertain times looks like a winner. And, unlike so many other Pentagon projects these days, the Littoral Combat Ship looks like it just might happen on time.

UPDATE 2:54 PM: Interesting: the Saudis want to buy the trimaran LCS... but with a stronger radar, and a whole lot more guns.

UPDATE 09/26/06 9:51 PM: Check out this sa-weeet video of the LCS being launched.

(Big ups: JH, TW)

Lasers Speak to Subs

Communicating with subs underwater is beyond tough. Sound moves through seawater in very strange ways, with water temperature, salinity, and density speeding up and slowing things down -- garbling conversations in the process. Electromagnetic transmissions (like radio) are no better -- the sea has some funky electrical conductivity. During the Cold War, sub authority Joe Buff notes, the Navy managed to get super-simple, one-way messages to its subs, with a pair of giant (28-mile!) extremely low frequency transmitters, based in the Midwest. But those transmitters were shut down, a few years back.

The Navy's new idea is to get specially-tuned lasers to handle the job, instead. The service has handed out a pair of small business innovation research contracts to Bothell, WA's Aculight Corporation and Bedford, MA-based Q-Peak to build blue-green, quick-burst lasers for transmitting messages across the deep. Acluight, for example, wants to use a combination of semiconductor and fiber lasers to produce a low power beam (around 10 watts) at about 532nm spectrum range. The idea is to get pulses as quick as half a nanosecond, repeating as much as 10 million times per second.

Blue-green lasers have been discussed for a while as potential sub-talkers, with good reason. Seawater has a lot of organic junk floating around inside, which makes it "turbid" -- "nearly opaque to light over much of any distance," Buff explains.

Blue-green light's frequency is best at penetrating through this turbidity, given the mix of sizes in microns of the particles and other stuff that prevents seawater from being transparent. (Of course, some areas such as the Bahamas are famous for the clarity of their water, but this is very much the exception, not the rule, globally speaking.) This same turbidity is essential to giving submarines their invisibility while submerged, so it's a double edged sword.

Lockheed's Bad Boats

In 2002, Lockheed Martin's Integrated Coast Guard Systems won a contract to stretch and improve as many as 49 Coast Guard patrol boats as part of the service's $24-billion Deepwater modernization effort.

Three years later, with just eight boats re-delivered, the Coast Guard called off the program, citing hull buckling and electronics problems. And it accelerated a new class of patrol boats to fill the gap, with testing beginning in the next couple years.

Something was up ... but nobody outside of the Coast Guard and Lockheed knew just what until former Lockheed engineer Michael DeKort posted a crude video to YouTube, as Defense Tech noted a couple weeks back.

In the video, DeKort alleged serious contractor misconduct on the patrol boat project. The story got some play on network TV, mostly on account of the YouTube angle, but an unsatisfied DeKort approached Defense Tech parent Military.com with detailed information including supporting documents. Read the first of our two-part expose here:

DeKort says the selection of the [Lockheed Martin] Aegis team [to work on the boats] was beginning of the program's problems. Aegis engineers are software experts; the patrol boats required little software work.

"Aegis has nothing to do with most of what we were doing on these boats," DeKort says.

That mismatch resulted in a number of contractor failures stemming from bad management, according to DeKort. He says that, in winning the contract, leaders promised to meet deadlines that were impossible at costs that were optimistically low -- around $8 million per boat. The resulting pressure encouraged corner-cutting, DeKort claims.

He says he observed three serious failures that were not corrected before the first boat re-entered Coast Guard service in March 2004:

1) Project leaders left a blind spot in the boat's security system when they omitted one of five video cameras to save money. When DeKort raised this issue with team leaders, they said the solution was "to lock the window" in the blind spot and periodically "check for broken glass" such as an intruder might leave behind.

2) In installing a new Forward-Looking Infra-Red camera, the team used a cheap cable that wasn't weatherproof, meaning it might fail in rain or high seas, depriving the boat's crew of its "eyes in the dark".

3) Perhaps most seriously, according to DeKort, the team used unshielded cables in the terminals that connect the boats to the military's secure internet. "Any foreign government monitoring these boats, from shore or from 'fishing boats', will be able to pick up all the communications from these boats. Since we have no shielded cables, these boats will emanate like an antenna.

Owing to this program failure and other complications, the Coast Guard has identified a "critical shortfall in patrol boat hours," according to Rear Admiral Gary T. Blore, Deepwater’s new program executive officer. The service is scrambling to find solutions. One proposal is to boost operating funds for the two Cyclone-class patrol boats donated by the Navy a few years back.

Tune in next week for part two of my Military.com series, where I take a look at some of the underlying causes of the patrol boat fiasco.

-- David Axe

China's Killer Hovercraft

China is about to buy a six pack of heavily-armed hovercraft, Defense News reports. Sino-hawks here are already starting to freak out over the sale.

"A few years ago, the 'don’t worry, be happy' school of analysis of the PLA [People's Liberation Army] said that we should all be reassured that the PLA couldn’t attack Taiwan because it didn’t have enough hovercraft. Clearly, this is changing," University of Miami's June Teufel Dreyer tells the military trade.

The 540-ton Zubr LCAC, the world’s largest amphibious assault hovercraft, can reach speeds in excess of 60 knots, can travel 300 nautical miles and can shoulder various large loads: 130 tons of cargo, 500 troops, three 50-ton medium battle tanks, 10 BTR-70 armored personnel vehicles or eight BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles.

"The Zubr will greatly enhance the PLA Navy’s capability to launch a large scale amphibious assault operation," Sinodefence.com observes.

At the moment the PLA has to rely on conventional landing ships for such an operation. The slow process for the troops and vehicles to swim from their carrier ships to the beachhead makes them highly vulnerable to enemy firepower. The LCAC’s ability to deliver troops, vehicles and cargos directly to the beach makes a huge advantage. China has developed several models of its own indigenous LCACs, but most of these are unarmed small designs carrying no more than 20 soldiers.

The deal to buy the hovercraft from Russia's Almaz Shipbuilding has been in the works for five years. And the initial order is teeny: just six ships. But "there are signs that China plans to build its own version of the Zubr-class craft," Defense News says.

"It could be that the Chinese want to test the vehicles or purchase a few and then begin... produc[ing] them in the PRC [People’s Republic of China]," Dreyer observes. "The amount ordered here, six, won’t be enough to mount an invasion. But it’s a start."

Mines, anyone?

Let's face it: nobody cares about mine warfare. We're talking slow boring ships plodding around looking for submerged hunks of metal. No guns. No missiles. No screaming fighter jets. No men in green facepaint slipping ashore in the dead of night. Even if mines are, historically, the biggest threat to U.S. warships, mine warfare is so unsexy that it's bound to get ignored until after a billion-dollar amphibious ship gets a hole ripped in it.

But all that's about to change. In a radical move signalling serious commitment to mine warfare, the Navy is abandoning (slow, hard to deploy) dedicated minehunters in favor of (fast, easily deployed) mine-clearing drones aboard destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships. The service is also revamping its airborne minehunting fleet, moving from big, unwieldy Sikorsky MH-53E Sea Dragons to the smaller Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk carrying wide range of new systems. Finally, Mine Warfare Command is merging with the Navy's antisubmarine warfare office to create a new "undersea warfare center of excellence".

Read the whole story at Military.com.

--David Axe

Nukes on Ice?

Picture floating nuclear reactors sailing the seven seas—generating emergency power at disaster sites, providing fresh water during droughts, and warming the shivering citizens of Siberia.

Now, add indomitable ice floes, highly enriched uranium, hellacious weather, and terrorists slavering over lightly guarded nuclear fuel. Apply a "Made in Russia" stamp and file these titans under Technological Terrors.

On June 14 the Severnoye Mashinostroitelnoe Predpriyatie (more commonly known as Sevmashpredpriyatie, or Sevmash shipyard, one of many Russian sites bursting with nuclear waste, signed a contract to construct a floating nuclear power plant. Sevmash will install pairs of KLT-40S reactors (also sometimes called KLT-40C because of transliteration errors, or just KLT-40) on barges. The Russian icebreaker fleet uses the same KLT-40 reactor type, fueled by high-enriched uranium (roughly 40% enriched). However, according to the Uranium Information Center, the floating reactors have been modified to use low-enriched fuel. Other specific differences between the reactors on the icebreaker fleet and those on the floating plants remain unclear.

(Note: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a short blurb [titled "Russia’s Sea Change"] about these floating plants in its latest issue. However, their piece asserts the reactor design will tentatively be a VBER-300. My sources almost uniformly say that the KLT-40S will definitely be the reactor for this initial, pilot project. The VBER-300 is being discussed for use in a proposed larger floating reactor, but the larger version is, as of now, only hypothetical.)

At full capacity, the two reactors together will provide up to 70 megawatts of power. They are also capable of desalinating water, though it is unclear whether this can be done at the same time as power production. There are 11 other possible sites for these plants in Russia, but very few regional leaders have expressed interest. Rosatom, the Russian civilian nuclear power agency, now hopes to sell them to interested countries in Asia once the design has been successfully demonstrated. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have already expressed interest.

On the surface, this may not seem such a bad idea. Proposals for mobile nuclear plants as desalinators have a long history — they don’t produce greenhouse gases and they could get to remote locations easily. Such a humanitarian sheen takes the edge off nuclear jitters, too. Fuel will be stored onboard and, to assuage proliferation concerns, the Russians claim that the barges will come back to Russia every 4-12 years for fuel disposal.

All indications, though, point to (dare I say typically Russian?) poor planning, with potential for serious problems.

The most glaring problem: the barges won’t be able to move without help. According to a Russian general cited in Pravda Online, a small squadron of tugboats (likely 8-10) will move the plants around. For most of their lives, these plants will sit, barnacle-like, in shallow waters, and their emergency usefulness will be nil.

Barnacled behavior also makes for a precarious security situation: in a civil war, for example, the plants would be prime, immobile targets for rebels or terrorists. No one knows whether Russia’s overstretched navy or the host country—whatever it may be—will provide security.

It also seems that no plans exist to harden the barges against ice, even though the first dozen or so will be used off the often-icebound northern coast of Russia. Perhaps officials figure a couple more drowned reactor cores will be mere drops in the ocean of radioactive waste already dumped in the region.

And while the fuel, which will formally remain in Russian custody, is supposed to be low-enriched uranium, it could be switched out for highly enriched—even weapons grade—fuel with relatively minor changes to the reactor. The use of a design that originally used HEU makes this possibility even more worrisome. Russia already has massive stocks of HEU, which, if used, would let the reactor run longer without refueling. Though HEU is admittedly easy to blend down, if Russia runs out of money, or gets lazy, using the HEU as is might be an attractive alternative to tugging the barges back to the motherland for more fuel every few years.

China has offered funding in exchange for a role in building the barges, but Russian officials declined because of technology transfer concerns. They were probably concerned that China would learn enough to build its own plants and steal market share from the Russian project.

Interestingly, Rosatom decided not to capitalize strongly on the need for desalination capacity, but rather to focus on the much more emotionally charged nuclear power generation capability of their plants. I’m at a loss for why this might be. Focusing on the humanitarian aspects of these plants would improve their marketability for buyers abroad.

Moscow will fund the first few plants—to be sited in the frigid, poor northern states of Russia, who scarcely need convincing—but the viability of the project depends on finding foreign buyers. Since Russian experts believe the desalination market alone will reach $12 billion by 2015, the focus on power production is baffling. Perhaps there is more to the project, but it is hard to tell for now.

Scanty reliable information on these plants exists, but we know they are being built. Rosatom officials have so far only offered broad, vaguely condescending platitudes as reassurance that these plants will be safe. Some claim that security will not be a problem because Sevmash is located in a high-security zone, but Pravda Online reports the plant will actually be open to the public. Others say the plant will have "five independent safety barriers," and that "[l]eakage won’t occur even if a plane or a helicopter crashes into the floating block." The Russians will perhaps forgive me if I don’t find these reassurances effective, especially in light of their usual utter frankness.

Rosatom acting director Sergey Obozov stated that "the reliability of offshore NPP [nuclear power plants] will be the same with the Kalishnikov gun." Even if reliability is not an issue, the comparison to AK-47s is unfortunate. Do we really want cheap floating nuclear plants proliferating into volatile regions, used indiscriminately by terrorists and despots?

-- Eric Hundman

(Eric Hundman is a research assistant at the World Security Institute's Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC. He graduated from Yale University in 2006 with degrees in physics and political science.)

Lebanon: Catamaran to the Rescue

The U.S. Navy's evacuation of Lebanon is done. Now, the focus is on delivering humanitarian aid to the Lebanese. At the center of the effort: the Navy's giant, super-quick catamaran.

Until recently, the experimental, Australian-built HSV-2 Swift was working as a mine warfare command and control ship. But with "its enormous 28,000 square foot mission deck, the ability to traverse littoral waters, the capability of handling speeds in excess of 40 knots, and maneuverability that doesn't require tugboat assistance," as Navy Newsstand notes, the catamaran was a natural for the Lebanese operation. "The vessel has the cargo space of about 17 C-17 aircraft and the access of a Cyclone-class patrol boat," said Lt. Cmdr. Phillip Pournelle, executive officer of Swift's Gold Crew.

And it's not the 318-foot catamaran's first humanitarian mission. Back in January, 2005, the Swift sped to Southeast Asia, to deliver aid to tsunami victims. In September, it brought supplies to the Gulf Coast in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The Swift's predecessor helped sneak SEAL teams into southern Iraq during the 2003 invasion.

The "wave-piercing, aluminum-hulled catamaran," originally designed as a commercial vessel, now comes with military enhancements, "such as a helicopter flight deck, small boat and unmanned vehicle launch and recovery capability, and an enhanced communications suite," the Navy says.

But it's the catamaran's ability to quickly get to an from ports -- without help -- that Navy leaders seem to find most attractive.

[Just before the Lebanese mission] "on the afternoon of July 11, Swift left Bahrain's Mina Salman pier with a shipload of cargo destined for USNS Supply (T-AOE 6) moored at Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates. Twelve hours later, the Navy-leased catamaran arrived alongside Supply, ready to off-load.

"The cargo was only touched twice," said Swift's Commanding Officer, Cmdr. Rob Morrison. "[Normally] we'd have to load a truck with the cargo, off-load it at the airport, load it back onto an aircraft, fly it to its destination, off-load it, and move it by truck to the ship, where it's delivered to the ship and finally loaded aboard..."

Upon arrival, Swift's crew had the cargo loaded onto the flight deck, thus allowing Supply's crane immediate access to the palleted goods. Within an hour, the transfer was complete.

UPDATE 07/25/06 9:35 PM: HSV-maker Incat is also working on a funky heavyweight elevator for the catamaran. It's designed to take copters up to the flight deck, or lower amphibious vehicles straight in the water, between the ship's twin hulls. "Sounds like a perfect way to
deploy a Marine platoon or company for quick-response missions like
embassy evacuations and small raids," reader JG says.

Sea Swap = More Bang for Your Buck

For decades, the Navy has assigned two crews apiece to its ballistic missile subs, or "boomers". One crew is out at sea in the sub while the other is training and resting back home. The idea is that double crews let you squeeze more sailing days out of your ships. Boomers are ideally suited because they sail on rigid schedules that let you plan rotations far in advance.

In 2004, with the fleet shrinking and ships in high demand on the Pacific and in the Persian Gulf, the Navy launched a program to double-crew several destroyers. The ships stayed at sea while crews flew out to man them on six-month rotations. This saved months of sailing time by eliminating the need to bring a ship home just so the crew could rest.

The program, called Sea Swap, was a qualified success. Crews bitched about losing that sense of ownership that comes with being a ship's sole crew. Morale was an issue. But in operational terms, Sea Swap worked: three destroyers could do the work of five by staying on station longer, avoiding long ocean transits and saving on wear and tear.

The Navy announced two weeks ago that it is ending Sea Swap as an experiment. It will study the results and decide whether and how to apply the lessons learned to future classes of ships like the LCS and DDG-1000 (formerly DD(X)).

In the meantime, the Navy's smallest fighting ships have permanently adopted a Sea Swap model. Once upon a time, the eight-ship class of coastal patrol boats (PCs) was scheduled for disposal, but now they're in high demand in shallow "green" waters like those of the Persian Gulf, as I write in the current National Defense Magazine:

Last year, recognizing the utility of these craft in green waters, the Navy halted all efforts to dispose of the remaining boats and even began negotiations with the Coast Guard to take back transferred PCs. The Navy moved two West Coast-based boats to Little Creek, a move that consolidated all operations and training at the Virginia base. At any given time, three boats are at Little Creek for drydocking and training while the rest remain forward deployed. Thirteen 30-person PC crews that are based at Little Creek fly out to the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, on six-month rotations.

Sea swapping effectively nearly doubles the size of your fleet without adding any new hulls. Expect the future Navy to do with all its ships what it has done with boomers, destroyers and PCs, cheaply turning 300 ships into 500.

Check out some of my patrol boat pictures at Flickr.

--David Axe

P.S. -- Check out one of several recent reviews of my graphic novel WAR FIX!

Duncan Hearts JFK, Hates Cash

No one, it seems, is ready to let JFK die. Certainly not U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who has proposed that NATO take ownership of the soon-to-be-mothballed U.S. aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy. Not that they can afford the thing. Or have the aircraft to fly off of it.

Read the hilarious details in Aerospace Daily.

Hunter apparently envisions NATO operating helicopters and "vertical-lift aircraft" (ie, tilt-rotors, which no NATO nation besides the U.S. owns). While NATO has successfully pooled its resources to operate a small fleet of E-3 AWACS, and will probably do the same with future fleets of ground-surveillance aircraft and airlifters, it neither needs an aircraft carrier nor has the $200 million per year it would take to keep one in service. For the record, NATO's annual budget is just $1.5 billion, a third of which comes from the U.S.

This is the latest -- but not wackiest! -- scheme to keep the JFK in service. Last year, when the Navy proposed axing the Kennedy to fund new shipbuilding, Rep. John Warner (R-Vir.) and his allies with economic ties to big naval facilities tried a million and one things to save the old ship. The loopiest scheme involved foisting the flattop on the Coast Guard -- yes, that Coast Guard -- for use as a mobile disaster-relief base.

Madness.

For the record: while cost-effective in terms of their ability to persist in hostile environments and put lots of bombs on targets, carriers are enormously expensive and manpower-intensive. Except for long-term, high-intensity operations, they're not worth the hundreds of millions of dollars annually it takes just to keep them afloat. That's why only the U.S. Navy (and soon the Royal Navy) operates large carriers. If the Coast Guard were to take on a carrier, it would have to abandon its long-overdue Deepwater shipbuilding plan.

Besides, disaster relief is a secondary role that carriers in Navy service can undertake while working up for or winding down from combat deployments. Keeping a carrier on Coast Guard retainer would mean a very expensive vessel doing nothing for 11 months out of the year.

NATO cannot afford a carrier any more than the Coast Guard can. Nor does NATO need a carrier when member states such as the U.S., Great Britain, France, Spain and Italy already contribute large and small carriers to NATO operations.

But this isn't really about giving NATO carrier capability. This is about sour grapes. Hunter: "Typically the United States brings the T-bone steaks and some of our allies bring the plastic forks. The John F. Kennedy might be a center for ... inspiring our allies to do more with respect to defense."

Yes, it's true that most of our NATO allies spend less of their GDP on defense than we and the Brits do. A serious commitment to collective defense is in order. But saddling the cash-strapped alliance with an old, redundant aircraft carrier is not going to help.

In fact, it would only hurt.

The JFK's ship has sailed (ha ha). Let her go.

--David Axe

F.O.B.s Afloat

There's a quiet revolution afoot in the Navy and Marine Corps, a new way of doing things that promises massive leaps in capability. It's called Seabasing, and nobody outside of the services seems to know anything about it.

In a nutshell, Seabasing involves grouping together cargo ships and amphibious assault ships into a huge offshore logistics and aviation base. Think traditional amphibious operations times ten, and sustainable for a month or more. Or think a huge Forward Operating Base (FOB), only afloat.

The idea behind Seabasing is to avoid the diplomatic complications of basing ground troops and aircraft in host countries. Turkey showed us back in 2003 that even seemingly staunch allies can waver at the last minute when they blocked the 4th Infantry Division from opening a northern front in Iraq. Seabasing sticks to international waters and grants us flexible, sustainable access to most of the world's trouble spots.

Seabasing hinges on hardware, oh yes, but it's mostly old hardware. In contrast to the pet projects of other services like the Air Force's F-22 or the Army's Future Combat Systems, there is no single Seabasing budget line to attract the attention of critics. Rather, Seabasing calls for using existing big-deck assault ships -- the Tarawas and Wasps and their eventual replacements, the LHA(R)s -- to support the aviation component, and San Antonio-class LPDs and Maritime Prepositioning Ships (MPSs) to support the people and cargo part. Lewis and Clark-class logistics ships, designed to support carrier battle groups, will shuttle between ports and the Seabase with fuel, dry goods and ammo. You see? Every piece of the puzzle has a traditional use that disguises its future major role in the Seabase. Clever, huh?

Besides the big ships, the most important component of the Seabase is what the Navy-Marine Corps team calls "connectors". These are the smaller platforms that shuttle people and stuff between the Seabase ships and between the Seabase and the beachhead. There are some connectors already in widespread use in the fleet, such as Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCACs), traditional landing craft and helicopters. Emerging connectors include catamarans and V-22 tilt-rotors. There has been some talk of designing new tilt-rotors and air-cushions for the connector role, too.

Really, Seabasing is a concept -- or, to use an Army phrase, a "system of systems". The inherent modularity of the idea means you can swap new platforms into the Seabase as necessary. Want a larger aviation component? Add an aircraft carrier or two. Want more forcible entry in a dense air-defense environment? Plug in some submarines carrying SEALs plus more LCACs and Expeditionary Fighting Vehicles. Need to sustain ground operations against an armored opponent? Base an Army division aboard your amphibs in place of the traditional Marine Expeditionary Force. Is it a natural disaster you're dealing with and not some rogue state? Convert berthing into medical wards, detach medevac choppers to the assault ships and maybe even add a hospital ship.

The possibilities are endless.

One problem: Just one quiet, lurking diesel sub could mean serious trouble for your big, fat immobile Seabase. That means work for flotillas of Littoral Combat Ships equipped with anti-sub modules, I imagine.

In March, Marine Commandant Michael Hagee addressed the Senate Appropriations Committee on the subject of connectors. Read his testimony ...

High-speed connectors will facilitate the conduct of sustained sea-based operations by expediting force closure and allowing the persistence necessary for success in the littorals. Connectors ... will link bases and stations around the world to the Seabase and other advanced bases, as well as provide linkages between the Seabase and forces operating ashore. High-speed connectors are critical to provide the force closure and operational flexibility to make Seabasing a reality.

* Joint High Speed Sealift. The Joint High Speed Sealift (JHSS) is an inter-theater connector that provides strategic force closure for CONUS-based forces. The JHSS is envisioned to transport the Marine Corps’ non self-deploying aircraft, personnel, and high demand-low density equipment, as well as the Army’s non self-deploying aircraft and personnel, and Brigade Combat Team rolling stock and personnel, permitting rapid force closure of this equipment. Additionally, the JHSS will alleviate the need to compete for limited strategic airlift assets, and reduce closure timelines by deploying directly to the sea base rather than via an intermediate staging base or advanced base. The JHSS program is currently in the early states of capability development and has merged with the Army’s Austere Access High Speed Ship program. Current fielding of the JHSS is projected in Fiscal Year 2017.

* Joint High Speed Vessel. The Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV) will address the Combatant Commanders’ requirements for a forward deployed rapid force closure capability to support the Global War on Terror. The JHSV will enable the rapid force closure of fly-in Marine forces to the sea base from advanced bases, logistics from pre-positioned ships to assault shipping, ship-to-ship replenishment, and in appropriate threat environments, maneuver of assault forces to in-theater ports and austere ports. Army and Navy programs were recently merged into a Navy-led program office with an acquisition strategy intended to leverage current commercial fast ferry technology, and acquisition of a modified non-developmental item (NDI). Contract award for new vessels is expected in Fiscal Year 2008, with delivery in 2010. To meet the current and near-term Combatant Commanders’ requirements, the Department of the Navy continues to lease foreign built vessels until the JHSV is delivered.

* Westpac Express (WPE) is providing support to III MEF and other Okinawa-based forces, enabling III MEF to expand off-island training and engagement while reducing battalion-training days spent off island. Additionally, WPE played a key role supporting the Indian Ocean tsunami relief effort. HSV-2 Swift provides a test bed for research and development prototypes as well as an operational platform in support of current real world requirements. Most recently, HSC-2 played a key role in support of JTF Katrina, providing high-speed delivery of supplies, equipment, and personnel to ships and ports along the US Gulf Coast.

* Joint Maritime Assault Connector. The Joint Maritime Assault Connector (JMAC), previously known as the Seabase-to-shore connector, will replace the venerable legacy landing craft air cushion (LCAC) as a critical tactical level platform supporting Marine Corps assault forces, as well as joint forces operating within the Sea Base. In comparison to the LCAC, the JMAC is envisioned to have many enhanced capabilities, such as the ability to operate in higher sea states, increased range, speed, and payload, increased obstacle clearance, and reduced operating and maintenance costs. The JMAC is planned for fleet introduction in Fiscal Year 2015.

Marine aviation will undergo significant transformation over the next ten years as we transition from 13 types of legacy aircraft to seven new platforms. We developed a new transition strategy to better balance numbers of assault support and TacAir aircraft based on operational requirements. This strategy supports our Seabasing concept and enables Ship-to-Objective Maneuver utilizing the Joint Strike Fighter, MV-22, and Heavy Lift Replacement, recently designated CH-53K. At a distance of 110 nautical miles, a squadron of MV-22s will lift a 975-Marine battalion in four waves in under four hours. Similarly, the CH-53K will replace our aging, legacy CH-53E helicopter, lifting more than twice as much over the same range and serving as the only sea-based air assault and logistics connector capable of transporting critical heavy vehicles and fire support assets. An Assault Support Capability Analysis is underway to determine the optimal mix of MV-22 and CH-53K aircraft required to support Ship-to-Objective Maneuver and Distributed Operations. Similarly, the Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing variant of the Joint Strike Fighter represents a transformational platform that will generate 25 percent more sorties and provide a multi-spectral engagement capability for the Expeditionary Strike Force.

* CH-53K. The CH-53K is our number one aviation acquisition priority. Consequently, the CH-53K received full funding in 2005 and has reached "Milestone B" status—initiation of system development and demonstrations. Our current fleet of CH-53E Super Stallion aircraft enters its fatigue life during this decade. The CH-53K will deliver increased range and payload, reduced operations and support costs, increased commonality with other assault support platforms, and digital interoperability for the next 25 years. The CH-53K program will both improve operational capabilities and reduce life-cycle costs. Commonality between other Marine Corps aircraft in terms of engines and avionics will greatly enhance the maintainability and deployability of the aircraft within the Air Combat Element. The CH-53K will vastly improve the ability of the MAGTF and Joint force to project and sustain forces ashore from a sea-based center of operations in support of EMW, Ship-to-Objective Maneuver, and Distributed Operations.

* Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) is our number one ground acquisition program, and it replaces the aging Assault Amphibious Vehicle (AAV) that has been in service since 1972. It will provide Marine surface assault elements with better operational and tactical mobility both in the water and ashore, and will exploit fleeting opportunities in the fluid operational environment of the future. Designed to launch from amphibious ships stationed over the horizon, it will be capable of carrying a reinforced Marine rifle squad. The EFV will travel at speeds in excess of 20 nautical miles per hour in a wave height of three feet. This capability will reduce the vulnerability of our naval forces to enemy threats at sea and ashore. Our surface assault forces mounted in EFVs will have the mobility to react and exploit gaps in enemy defenses ashore. Once ashore, EFV will provide Marines with an armored personnel carrier designed to meet the threats of the future. The EFV has high-speed land and water maneuverability, highly lethal day/night fighting ability, and enhanced communications capability. It has advanced armor and nuclear, biological, and chemical collective protection. These attributes will significantly enhance the lethality and survivability of Marine maneuver units.

hybrid sailors for hybrid ships

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) will revolutionize the way the Navy operates. Designed to accomodate a wide range of "mission modules" equipped with different sensors, weapons and unmanned vehicles, LCS will bring unprecedented flexibility to the fight. But there's a catch: to save money, the 3,000-ton ship will be crewed by just 75 sailors. That ain't many.

The trick to pulling off efficient manning of a multi-mission vessel is training your sailors to perform a wider range of tasks than ever before. The Navy's got a plan to do this. It involves lots of schooling, higher standards and a work environment that encourages personal initiative. It calls the product a "hybrid sailor".

The first LCS won't join the fleet for a couple years, but the Navy is already training up its first hybrid sailors. The test cases are the 30-man crews of the Navy's 8-vessel coastal patrol boat community. Check out my story in today's Military.com Warfighter's Forum for more:

One hundred and eighty feet long and displacing just 320 tons (versus more than 8,000 tons for a destroyer), the patrol boats, called PCs by their crews, are among the smallest Navy fighting ships. Their small size means they can maneuver in waters that are too shallow and too crowded for destroyers and cruisers, making them ideal for operations on the Arabian Gulf and in other littoral waters where the world's pirates, smugglers and insurgents hide. But for their crews of just 30, the PCs are a lot to handle -- and so are their diverse and dangerous missions.

PC sailors must wear many hats. Besides the gunner's role indicated by his rank, [Gunner's Mate 1st Class Jacob] Frasier also serves as assistant section leader, master helmsman, ammunition administrator, conning officer and small boat coxswain -- and he's working on his officer-of-the-deck qualification. This is far more responsibility than most big-ship sailors bear, but it's typical of PC sailors, and it's a preview of things to come for the Navy-at-large. Today's destroyers have more than 300 people aboard, but to save money, the new 3,000-ton Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS, is designed for a crew of just 75. Manning an LCS will demand the same flexibility and broad responsibility that today's PCs sailors demonstrate every day.

Read the whole story here.

Cost Cutting the Super Sub

The Navy's submarine force is in trouble. A shrinking number of boats is struggling to meet steady demand from regional commanders. Meanwhile, the cost of the only U.S. submarine currently in production, the super-high-tech Virginia-class attack boat, has risen to $2.3 billion apiece. At that price, the Navy can afford to buy only one per year. Do the math: since attack boats last only 30 years, building one boat per year means your fleet is eventually going to shrink to 30 boats from the current 55. Long-range plans call for 48 attack subs, so how is the Navy going to get there?

Some observers have called for the Navy to start production of new, smaller and cheaper boats, perhaps even diesel-electrics rather than nukes. But the long ranges that U.S. boats must travel, their need for big hulls (for mission flexibility) and the strong pro-nuke culture of U.S. submariners means diesels aren't a realistic option.

Plus, no U.S. shipyard has built diesel boats in more than 50 years, so where would you get them from? Germany? Sweden? Both countries build fine diesel boats, but Congress ain't likely to go begging to these reluctant allies for cheap submarines. No, nukes are where it's at, and nukes never come cheap. The Navy wants to buy two Virginias per year to sustain fleet numbers, but it refuses to do so unless the price drops to $2 billion. The two U.S. submarine manufacturers -- Newport News and Electric Boat -- want the work, but can they knock $300 million off the Virginia's price?

Aviation Week has run a story on efforts to trim Virginia's cost:

The most effective way to lower the per-hull price of Virginias, by more than $150 million apiece, is a more efficient build rate to distribute overhead costs and increase learning efficiencies, according to [Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Ships Allison] Stiller, Vice Adm. Paul Sullivan, head of Naval Sea Systems Command, and Rear Adm. Charles Hamilton II, program executive officer for ships. An additional $25-$80 million in savings is possible through a "reallocation" between the shipbuilders, they said.

A second story goes into detail:

Seven capital-expenditure (capex) projects have been approved or are in development to help General Dynamics Corp.'s Electric Boat and Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Newport News slice costs off the Virginia-class submarine program, Navy Rear Adm. William Hilarides said April 17. ...

Five capex efforts have been approved, including a light fabrication project at Electric Boat's Quonset Point shipyard. There also is a centralized coating facil