CDR Salamander

Last Wednesday I had a few observations on Jerry Hendrix's latest article over at National Review, “The Navy’s Littoral Hubris.”

Yesterday in comments, a man familiar to readers here, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, weighed in with some counterpoints that I feel need to be brought above the fold for your consideration.

With his permission, I've copied his comments in full.

There are the bones of one hell of a book here in six short paragraphs.  

Bob, over to you;

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As he always does, my good friend Jerry writes a compelling, well written post. However, I think he misses an important point. The problems the Navy has faced has less to do about technological hubris and more with incompetence in developing cost-informed requirements and executable support processes.

Let's start with the Ford CVN. Back in the day-- around the time of the 1993 Bottom Up Review, long before the word transformation had found its way into Pentagon thinking--the Navy and Air Force were competing for the "rapid halt" mission. The thinking went that the enemy could launch an invasion of allied territory at a time of their own choosing. The job of the Joint Force was to halt the invasion as quickly as possible through intense guided munitions bombardment. The Air Force argued the best way to do this was using bombers and regionally based aircraft, which enjoyed a big advantage in sortie rates from land bases. The Navy was intent on proving they could match sortie generation rates from forward deployed carriers. To do that, they needed a new electromagnetic catapult system; an electromagnetic arresting system; new high speed low drag elevators, etc etc etc. They called for these new capabilities with no clear understanding of the cost to get them, or a sensible land-based prototyping and testing approach to work out the bugs before shipboard integration. It is true that OSD demanded that all the new technologies be incorporated into the first ship of class of the new CVNX (later Ford), rather than inserting them over the first three hulls. That caused a technology integration overload. But the original sin was setting new requirements with no clue how much it might cost to get them.

Then came the DD-21, aka DD(X), aka DDG-1000. The surface community knew that the 31-ship Spruance class was going to start decommissioning starting in 2005 (that was the plan, anyway). The community needed a plan to replace them. The community was also tired of taking a back seat behind the carrier and sub forces, a circumstance they were force to tolerate throughout the long Cold War. And it wanted to get in on the rapid halt mission. The arsenal ship was a conceptual start point. But the surface community wanted something even more exotic. So they called for a stealthy surface ship with deep magazines--missiles, or guns, or both. OSD was not the one pushing the stealth design. That was all Navy. And, in the end, the Navy designed a 15,000-ton battle cruiser with a hull that was literally too expensive to produce. The ship suffered the same technological overload at the Ford class, but the over-spec-ing of the ship was all Navy, not OSD. Again, these were sins of the Navy.

The LCS is a more complicated story. OSD told the Navy that OSD would not support their DD(X) unless there was a smaller combatant in the Navy's battle force. The Navy decided to get out of the frigate business during the 1997 QDR--again, a Navy decision. This meant the smallest surface combatant in the 21st century fleet would have a full load displacement of nearly 9,000 tons (DDG-51 Flt I). OSD didn't think the Navy could afford to build and maintain such a fleet. They were, of course, spot on...see fleet of today. The ONLY requirement OSD levied on the LCS program was that the Navy needed to be able to build three of the ships for the same cost as a DDG-51. And guess what? The Navy hit that mark. We just forget about it--and how important a metric it was.

Cost aside, the crewing, training, maintenance and deployment process decisions were all the Navy's to make. But every choice ultimately proved to be beyond the ability of the surface community to execute them. This was a case of process, not technological, overload. It appears the surface community may be finally figuring things out on the ship. But no objective review of the LCS fleet transition plan would conclude anything other than it was abysmally bungled.

The reason I think we have to remember these vignettes is we need to ask ourselves if we are about ready to repeat the process. IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT THE NAVY CHOSE A PROVEN DESIGN FOR FFGX. The Navy is cramming as many requirements and capabilities into the FFGX hull as they can. Eric Lab at CBO is convinced the Navy has once again overspec'd the ship and underestimated the costs to build it. I hope he is wrong. But if we can't build a minimum of two FFGXs for the cost of a DDG FltIII, it is not clear it is worth the cost, or the smaller fleet it will inevitably lead to.

Robert O. Work spent 27 years on active duty as a Marine artillery and MAGTF officer. He is a former Undersecretary of the Navy and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security. He served as the Deputy Secretary of Defense alongside three Secretaries of Defense spanning both the Obama and Trump administrations.

When something you know is mundane, ordinary, and clearly unclassified is all of a sudden stamped with a classification, your first reaction should be, “What are they hiding?”, not, "What neat things are they doing!" 

With the news out that we are restarting the process (again) to replace our effective but aged TICONDEROGA Class CG, it would be helpful to look back at the first attempt to deliver a concept, last decade's aborted CG(X) study.

A friend known to me IRL was involved in that process first hand, and he agreed to put together a guest post, anonymously, on what he saw as the most important things for the new team to consider.

Over to him.

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It was encouraging to read that the Navy is pressing forward with a “large surface combatant requirements evaluation team” to address replacement of the Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruisers. Early in the last decade, I was involved in the $20 million CG(X) Study that burped out a $7 billion nuclear cruiser and was, understandably, discarded. We did things the usual way and we got the usual results—an unaffordable platform. In this case, unlike other notable shipbuilding programs, somebody had the courage to reject it out of hand.

Our CG(X) study was a multi-year effort which involved every organ of the defense industry: OPNAV, NAVSEA, Naval Reactor Navy Labs, FFRDC’s (Federally Funded Research and Development Centers), AEGIS-BMD and, importantly, industry.

The study was led by an intrepid young officer, who worked for a rotating pool of Captains, and a rotating pool of Admirals, all of whom were in DC to make their mark and go onto the next career milestone. It was from this blur of leadership that the requirements for the new cruiser emerged. At that time, it concerned the Chinese DF-21D missile.

Requirements for power also emerged. Even then we could see that the new direction was directed energy or other high energy systems (e.g., railgun). Sustainability (the ability to operate independently for sustained periods) was recognized as a priority.

During the processes of analyzing alternatives, we looked at several hull forms. One suggestion was the LPD-17 LPD. It was the “knee in the curve” cost- and capability-wise. But it wasn’t fast. And it wasn’t CRUDES. And it couldn’t operate without support.

Superimposed upon all this was a lingering imperative from then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that if a platform didn’t have “transformational” technology (new stuff) it was subject to divestment. So, the result of the CG(X) study—now incomprehensible--is completely understandable if you understand the politics and the less austere budget at the time.

If I were to offer those undertaking this new study some advice, it would be this:

1. Requirements Evaluation Team. Require they produce a written letter (not a PowerPoint brief) at the end of their study and have each of them sign it. All the members. That way, years from now, we will know who to thank or blame. This is part of the problem.

2. Billet permanence in requirements generation. Imbed senior Program office people into OPNAV N96 (Surface Warfare). Let the people who actually have to execute this stuff at least be in the room when these requirements are generated. Make the tour lengths five years.

3. Surface warfare really needs to rethink its love affair with BMD. Once seen as a cash cow for building Aegis ships, what has actually happened is the Navy is paying for much of this mission out of hide. Specifically out of surface warfare readiness. BMD ships are tethered to a spot in the ocean to provide missile protection, are often denied opportunity for in port maintenance. The ships I saw in worse shape were those doing BMD.

4. Resurrect the “one technology innovation per platform” rule that guided us from post-WWII through the cold war.

We used to limit the introduction of new technologies to one per platform, so as not to risk the efficacy of a platform because of the failure of a single new system.

My sense in reading RADM Route’s comments is that this is the direction they are heading in (using an existing platform). But I wanted to say it just in case.

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Photo credit sabotage181.

He gets it - he being Clark "Corky" Graham, former senior vice president of Northrop Grumman Ship systems. In DefenseDaily, he outlines five fundamental tenaets of the right approach to CG(X).

1. CG(X) should be a mod repeat. "We should recapture the significant investment we have already made in the many new platforms of ships we have already introduced to the Navy," he said. "In today's fiscally constrained environment, we cannot afford to start and find another 10 or so billion dollars to start from scratch."

There also needs to be an emphasis on commonality when it comes to building CG(X), Graham noted. "Commonality of combat systems and commonality of HME sub systems, so that we don't proliferate new solutions to the fleet."

Maybe most important, Graham said, is that industry needs the naval architectural constraint of an existing platform to discipline the requirements setters in the Pentagon and in the technical community. "Because we cannot afford to set unrealistic requirements, which will lead to unaffordable solutions."

2. The mod repeat that CG(X) should be built upon should be DDG-1000.

3. Subsystems for CG(X) need to be scalable and flexible.
Those subsystems should incorporate all the features of open architecture, he added.
And all 19 planned CG(X)s that the Navy intends to build do not have to have the same capability, Graham noted. "We should be able to change the capability and flex the capability of each of the ships in the class during the service life," he said. "To put teeth in this concept, the Navy and industry should establish KPPs, critical performance parameters, that specify that the ship can be scaled and flexed during the service life with no hot work, with no significant rip out and change to the ship."

4. CG(X) and its combat systems should be designed in a disciplined design-to-cost environment.

"I do not agree that you set requirements first and then you determine the cost of the ship. That strategy will absolutely guarantee that the first iterations of the ship will be totally unaffordable, and we will dither years before we iterate into a solution that will be affordable and allow us to build sufficient numbers of ships," he said.
5. Making sure the ship and the combat systems are developed and acquired together.

"I don't agree with the discussion where a combat system was proposed to be developed separately from any targeted platform," he said. "When you do that, you miss the opportunity of engineering out the white space, of engineering out the excess cost, weight, volume, power, and cooling between each element of the ship. Principally, the combat systems and the platform and inevitably modules get put on the interfaces and the total solution results in a large ship and a more costly ship, something we can't afford."

Beats the nothing we are hearing out of the USN right now. We have to get that new DDG-1000 hull in the water though - but that is on the way. Would be nice to recapture some of that cost, and in the end we really don't have a choice. Anyway, DDG-1000 is actually a Cruiser ...but that is just me tilting at windmills.

As if you needed another window into the crisis in Navy Shipbuilding;


We hold a conference titled "The Road to CG(X)" and ....

Although the cruiser program “represents the very heart of the future surface Navy,” Sullivan repeatedly mentioned items that would not be discussed at the conference, including details of the super-secret Analysis of Alternatives for the ship, or discussions of the cruiser’s hull form, radar or missiles.

Then why spend all the money for the conference? I think this sums it up for me.

“The longer the Navy delays the CG(X), it looks to others like they’re waiting for the next administration to take office,” Ron O’Rourke, chief naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service, said during a panel discussion following Sullivan’s address.

“There’s a road out there to the CG(X), but at present it is a decidedly unclear one,” O’Rourke said, speaking at the conference in his personal capacity.

The delay in the analysis, O’Rourke opined, isn’t due to some kind of paralysis.

“The Navy, I think, has its reasons for holding back, even if it won’t share those reasons with others.”

O’Rourke decried the Navy’s ambiguous positions on its shipbuilding programs.

“This is my 25th year of tracking Navy programs,” he told the audience of several hundred engineers. “I can’t remember a time when the issue of surface combatant procurement appeared as unsettled as it does now.”

Trying to figure out what the Navy is thinking, O’Rourke said, is “Kremlinology.”

Leadership.

The Cluebat of History™ is a tough teacher. All the "Transformational" chickens are roosting. Revolutionary always has a higher risk than evolutionary - now you are seeing what happens when you wind up on the short end of risk.

Meanwhile, the fleet provides Byron job security.

....and a little of Galrahn as well, ...... perhaps ...

The US Navy's top officer has warned that the skyrocketing costs of designing and building cutting-edge warships - a problem that has plagued some shipbuilding programs in recent years - could hamper the service's ability to obtain the fleet it needs to defend American interests as well as deter China and other rising naval powers.

Admiral Gary Roughead, who took over as chief of naval operations in September, said in a recent interview that the Navy should expand its fleet from 280 ships to 316 in the coming decades.

Here is a key point,

"We have to do all we can to make sure we are setting the requirements right - that we are not just putting things on that we want - [and] that we monitor the cost and construction in such a way that we don't lose control over that cost and we are able to deliver the ships to the country."

CNO, if I may humbly suggest, you can start by firing more SES who have a fetish for Transformationalism, Bu11sh1t Bingo, and PPT Programs - and then play Gen. Marshall and have a Valentine's Day Massacrer of SES and Flag Officers who are responsible for this mess so others can come in to support a program to put more ships pierside. National Security Frigate, EuroFrigate, or LCS-I; something to fill the breach until we can come up with an effective indigenous Corvette to Frigate sized ship - and do it along the lines that got us the FFG-7 class.

Will you drive an evolutionary follow-on to the Arleigh Burke class, or will we follow the outline provided by Proverbs 26:11? There are hints that you are looking evolutionary (off the gilded DDG-100) for CG(X) to recapture some of that development cost (smart),

...the Navy now estimates that each Zumwalt destroyer will cost more than $3 billion, well over earlier estimates of $2 billion per ship.

Several years ago, the Navy had planned to purchase at least 30 of the warships but the high cost has led the Pentagon to reduce the order to just seven.
...
Roughead said the service is studying the possibility of designing a new cruiser, known as the CG(X), that could use many of the same technologies developed for the Zumwalt with the hope that doing so will "mitigate the risk" of building the new warship. But figuring out ways to keep construction and operating costs down is considered paramount, he said.

Spruance is to Tico what Zumwalt is to CG(X)? We'll see. BTW, it rolled of the page real fast, so if you did not get a chance to see Saturday's shipbuilding post (with graphs!), click here.