Ongoing efforts against terrorism and in helping our partners' capabilities will require speed to overcome the "tyranny of distance," capacity to support distributed forces, and access to "partner in the brown and secure the green."1
These three capabilities are not new to naval forces. Currently the Navy is leasing the 98m wave-piercing, catamaran hulled, high-speed vessel (HSV-2) Swift, built by INCAT, Australia. This is the only maritime platform in operation with all three capabilities in one vessel. While much of the Navy leadership has yet to fully comprehend what it can do with this powerful mix, the warfighters and geographic combatant commanders have already been using it enthusiastically.
The Swift has proven to be fast and extremely adaptable, able to meet a wide range of mission needs. Requirements for the U.S.-built version, the joint high-speed vessel (JHSV), could potentially deliver a more costly ship that could be less versatile than the vessel in operation today.
JHSV requirements are being developed with too narrow a vision. The geographic combatant commanders using the Swift today would be better served by a much wider concept of the JHSV for the new global environment.
It's All about the Mix
The Swift is an extremely versatile platform because of its core capabilities. But the current JHSV design overinvests in fixed and organic capabilities, thus limiting the vessel's applicability as a logistics platform for troop and equipment movement. Requirements are being developed to use the ship solely as a connector to and from forward sea bases of operations.
The Swift's crew requested strongly to participate in last year's inaugural Global Fleet Station deployment in Latin America, and then in the African Partnership Station in West Africa. This aggressive action did increase the HSV mission portfolio and reinforce mission potential to operational commanders. But it did not influence HSV critics. The JHSV requirements should be reviewed with a much wider vision oriented toward the global environment. The ship should retain its speed, capacity, and access; adding fixed capabilities will only detract from these core ones.
Speed
With a top speed of 50 knots and an operating speed of 35 knots (subject to loading), the Swift is best employed as more of a strategic lift platform, such as a cargo plane, than as a ship. In response to a tsunami in the Gulf of Thailand, the United States dispatched several ships including the Swift to render assistance. Leaving from Texas in January 2005, the Swift arrived in the South China Sea at the recovery staging area in 23 days.2
During a deployment to Central Command, the ship was able on short notice to replace a damaged small boat that was critical to the security of the Iraqi oil infrastructure. The Swift entered and exited Bahrain at night to deliver the new boat within 12 hours of the request. The alternative plan would have taken more than two weeks.
During relief operations following Hurricane Katrina, the Swift's crew often had breakfast in New Orleans and dinner in Pensacola, in a 12-hour transit to resupply New Orleans. It took 48 hours to drive a truck through the damaged highway infrastructure.
Capacity
The HSV looks deceptively small from the outside. Her large cargo area/mission bay is not obvious without walking on board. HSV-2 Swift full displacement is 1,800 tons, with up to 22,000 square feet of cargo capacity for up to 500 tons available for cargo.3
In a single intra-theater transit, the ship can carry the equivalent of 17 sorties of a C-17. The space capacity of the mission bay is further enhanced by five mission module support stations that provide air, power, water, telephone, and secure and non-secure Internet access.
The Swift was built on a commercial car ferry frame and can carry everything in the U.S. Marine Corps inventory, including M1A2 tanks. The stern vehicle ramp is designed to slew to a pier and enable the drive-on and drive-off of rolling stock.
In less than 24 hours, the Swift transported from Morocco to Spain a battalion of Marines with their armored assault vehicles and Humvees, trucks, and other equipment; that journey would require up to three days for the legacy force.
The ship's crane can to handle loads up to 26 tons, which means that 11m RHIBs, seal-delivery vehicles, and surface and subsurface remote operating vehicles can be launched and recovered. Because of her large capacity, a Fleet commander can load more than one mission module and still have excess capacity for additional assets such as boats and other vehicles.
The Swift's cargo capacity is so great that for United Assistance (the January-February 2005 Indonesian tsunami relief effort), Task Force Katrina (August-September 2005), and Task Force Lebanon (August 2006), there was never any material left behind and plenty of room for more. The flight deck is day- or night-capable and certified for HH-60s, UH-1s, AH-1s, HH-46s, and all VTOL/VSTOL UAVs. The crane reaches the flight deck to support complex aircraft maintenance.
Access
The Swift has an operational planning draft of 4 meters. The ship's four water jets can reverse thrust and be steered up to 30 degrees off axis. Through combinations of water-jet positions, the Swift can move laterally in any direction and spin in place. This maneuverability, along with her shallow draft, allows her to enter or exit even the tightest of ports self-sufficiently, without additional logistics support.
She uses all-electronic navigation. With the commercial navigation system fed by Global Positioning System inputs and verified through radar navigation, the ship can navigate into any charted waterway. Once moored, she can operate without stevedores, overhead gantries, cranes, or other services because she has her own crane and vehicle ramp.
The combination—shallow draft, maneuverability, electronic navigation, and shore throughput—gives the Swift unsurpassed access to austere and/or damaged ports. From the perspectives of cost savings, force protection, and risk mitigation, this makes the HSV extremely attractive for theater engagement missions.
Don't Unbalance the Mix
The JHSV program is planning a platform that sells short the full potential capabilities of the HSV concept. The key performance parameters, performance specifications, and other design parameters drafted by the JHSV program reflect the narrow vision of the new vessel's expected application.4 Adding fixed capabilities will give the JHSV lower performance than the HSV in use today.
The 98m-long HSV-2 Swift has been successful because of her simplicity and adaptability. Since 2003, the ship has provided the combatant commanders unprecedented operational availability by employing dual military crews operating in a Blue/Gold rotation. Future intentions to supplant this military crewing concept with civilian mariners could adversely impact operational availability and limit the ship to operating in a single theater of operations.5
The Swift has been very adaptable to a wide range of missions primarily because her capacity and speed have not been diminished by fixed capabilities. The additional weight and structural requirements of a heavy flight deck, underway replenishment equipment, or fixed troop berthing could slow her down while using space needed for other missions.
Despite plans to enlarge the ship length to 112 meters and the weight to around 3,000 metric tons, JHSV requirements are only 600 metric tons of capacity, out of a potential 1,000 metric tons that a larger hull design would allow. Whereas the HSV-2 Swift has an operational speed (loaded with cargo) greater than 35 knots, the JHSV is only expected to have a loaded operational speed of 25 knots.6
The JHSV key performance parameters and performance specifications require 120 permanent beds of troop berthing. This fixed capability will yet further detract from the ship's overall adaptability. Historically, the Swift's troop berthing was only used for short periods and has been largely unused.
Fortunately, the requirement for a tensioned rig for underway replenishment has been removed. Assigning a low-weight, low-draft, HSV to maintain station alongside a deep-draft ship with a tensioned rig pulling on her would have been a significant challenge requiring a serious discussion of its own.
The Swift has been successfully refueled via astern replenishment on multiple occasions. Because of the ship's maneuverability, she has rafted, mooring to an anchored or slow-moving ship, with Kaiser- and Supply-class support vessels, simultaneously completing refueling (in less than an hour) and transferring cargo. A tensioned rig for underway replenishment would have required a significant investment of weight.
Put the Hangar Bay Back
To compensate for the weight and space requirements of permanent embarked troop berthing, the JHSV plans have removed the helicopter hangar bay.7 But the Swift's flight deck and helicopter hangar have been an important force multiplier. With an embarked MH-60S, the ship served as the primary casualty evacuation and logistics support ship platform during piracy-suppression operations in the Horn of Africa in June and July 2006. Because the Anti-Piracy Joint Task Force was operating in a region outside the Navy's traditional logistics chain, the average logistics delivery cycle for critical cargo was up to 14 days.8
The Swift reduced this to three days and conducted a medical evacuation in less than 30 hours (compared with three days for a conventional ship).
Without the helicopter embarked on the Swift, the Joint Task Force would have had to accept a considerably higher risk. The vessel demonstrated the utility of independently maintaining a helicopter in a remote operating area, while giving the Joint Force Commander a powerful combination of strategic speed and tactical aviation.
The removal of a hangar bay from the JHSV requirements, the addition of berthing for a civilian crew, and other requirements illustrate that the JHSV is envisioned as only a focused logistics platform for carrying troops and equipment to and from the sea base. This is why the process has focused on adding such transportation capabilities at the expense of the Swift's core capabilities. The intention to construct simply a connector to the sea base falls woefully short. As the Swift has proven, the JHSV could be a connector to the world in direct support of the Global Maritime Partnership.
Adaptability
The Swift's unique combination of capabilities were critical in fall 2006 counter-terrorism operations in the Indonesian Sea. As an afloat forward staging base, her strategic speed enabled the vessel to respond to actionable intelligence. Because of her capacity she could transport security teams, boarding teams, boats, and a surveillance helicopter critical to the mission. And her access capability meant she could enter remote, undeveloped ports that a U.S. ship had never before visited. These visits included community relations programs to assist in the development of civic facilities and build relationships. No single ship in the U.S. inventory other than the Swift could have carried out these missions simultaneously.
As this vessel's potential continues to be explored, a number of missions could be executed by an HSV similar to the Swift. These include:
- Humanitarian assistance/disaster relief
- Expeditionary warfare
- Command and control of afloat and shore forces
- Riverine support operations
- Medical response operations
- Piracy suppression
- Theater engagement
- Maritime domain awareness
- Unmanned vehicle operations
- Unmanned submersible vehicle operations
- Afloat forward staging base for efforts against terrorism
- Vessel boarding, search, and seizure
Small craft mother ship
The Swift was designed originally as a mine-warfare experimentation platform. Remote mine-hunting vehicles have operated off this and other HSV platforms. Unmanned and remote vehicle operations have shown that the future Navy can indeed remove the Sailor from the threat area.
The HSV can carry multiple mission packages, such as mine warfare and/or ASW mission modules, complete with remote sensors and weapons. This comes without the cost inherent in warships with a more robust survivability structure.
As versatile as the Swift has proven to be, with augmentation she can easily be adapted for additional missions in the global maritime environment, such as:
- Hospital ship: Mobile medical and dental services can be quickly delivered or stationed on board by driving the appropriate vehicles into the mission bay and quickly offloading on station.
- Consequence management: The vessel's core capabilities make her an ideal platform to contain and respond to disasters. In addition to the weather events she has already helped to handle, she could be outfitted and employed to deal with oil spills and other marine contaminations.
- Homeland defense: Counternarcotics operations demand speed of response and the capacity to deal with law enforcement detachments and support equipment.
- Antisubmarine warfare: Remote ASW from a JHSV may be limited only by willpower. It could be a more affordable response to the shallow-water submarine threat. The Swift's high speed can not only move her away from the threat, it may also create extremely limited lines of approach for the sub to exploit. We need to research and evaluate the vulnerability of the HSV to submarines, with her low magnetic signature, high speed, and water jet propulsion.
The HSV is not designed to fight in surface action during a major contingency operation, but she is versatile enough to conduct counterterrorist missions and possibly some traditional maritime warfare missions as well. Meanwhile, more costly combatants could be used for missile defense and maritime force-on-force operations.
Valuable and Underused Asset
There is so much more the JHSV could be doing. The Swift has only scratched the surface of missions that can be accomplished with an adaptable platform. If we move forward with the planned civilian-mariner manning for the Navy's JHSV, we will severely restrict the range of potential missions not yet attempted.
Civilian manned ships will not be expected to contribute to Maritime Domain Awareness, enter potential combat zones, or board and search suspect vessels. They will not be able to adapt quickly to the wide range of missions that the Swift has already carried out, much less to the far wider mission areas that combatant commanders may require based on the Swift's short history.
And it is a cost-effective vessel. INCAT recently sold a 112m luxury HSV to Japan for about $60 million.9 The JHSV program expects the initial cost of a 112m vessel to be about $210 million.10 In contrast, the littoral combat ship (LCS) was originally estimated at $250 million, but is now estimated to cost up to $500 million.11
The Swift's operating costs have been $11 million per year, while the estimated operating cost for the LCS is projected at approximately $14 million per year.12 In the four and a half years since we began leasing the Swift from INCAT, she has provided a significant return on investment. If we design the JHSV with simplicity in mind, we can expect this trend to continue.
Combatant commanders have already been making use of the Swift's capabilities. They have not waited for the development of a new Global Maritime Strategy and its associated acquisition programs. The Swift's lease expires next month. While there is movement to lease a gap-filler or bridge to the JHSV, there appears to be a strong desire to accelerate the use of civilian crews (pending a formal decision on naval-variant JHSV manning structure).
When the first JHSV comes on line in 2012, what capabilities will it possess? Will it be as versatile as its predecessor? Will the Navy recognize the strategic, operational, and tactical benefits of all military crews on future HSVs to support adaptable mission possibilities? Success requires a much wider vision and approach. We need to open the aperture and see the vast array of opportunities at hand.
1. Commander, Logistics Forces Naval Central Command (Task Force 53).
2. Brandy Lewis, "Operation Unified Assistance: Naval Aviation's Swift Response to the Tsunami Disaster," Naval Aviation News, 1 March 2005.
3. International Catamaran, High Speed Vessel Drawings and Stability Documents.
4. Joint High Speed Vessel Program Office, "Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV) Program Overview," 13 September 2006.
5. For details, see http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,105242,00.html and http://www.imo.org/Safety/mainframe.asp?topic_id=352.
6. Joint High Speed Vessel Program Office, "Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV) Program Overview," 13 September 2006.
7. Ibid.
8. Commander, Task Force 53.
9. Phil Ingram, Australian Ministry of Trade, http://www.business.australia.or.jp/newsletter/english.
10. Congressional Budget Office estimated cost for 2003.
11. Grace Jean, "Littoral Combat Ship Could Slip Behind Schedule As Price Tag Nears $500 Million," National Defense, August 2007, http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2007/August/LittoralCombatShip.htm.
12. Congressional Budget Office estimated cost for 2003.