The success of the Virginia-class submarine program has been attributed in large part to the effort to absorb and apply lessons learned from the Seawolf program. Following close on the heels of that predecessor, the Virginia’s principal players in both government and industry were determined to have a better outcome in terms of cost and schedule performance. They had the advantage of recent, firsthand experience to draw upon from a project that had originally involved a 29-ship class but was foreshortened to just 3.
Likewise, the United Kingdom, now embarking on the replacement of its four Vanguard-class submarines, is in a position to profit from what happened during the Astute program. Australia, after what will be more than a decade-long hiatus from submarine shipbuilding, is contemplating a replacement for its Collins class.
Australia’s case is closest to what most countries experience. As budget realities and engineering reevaluations of hull life result in longer operational lives, new starts for submarine programs are becoming less frequent. And unless positive steps are consciously taken, design, engineering, construction, testing, and management skills atrophy over time. To continuously improve and deal with the inevitable periods of no design or production work, the counteracting measures required are to document, learn, remember, and use past lessons, both the good and the bad, in efforts that follow. Because not everything will apply in all circumstances, it is important to also understand the context of a particular program and the circumstances it faced.
Document, Learn, Remember, Use
What was learned in the past should occasionally be reinforced in a public forum. In 2011 the RAND Corporation produced a four-volume report, Learning from Experience, which extensively documents what was learned during these programs in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. While serving to reinforce the most critical aspects of these experiences, these studies add observations that may be helpful to those leading future submarine building programs or, for that matter, any large, complex design and construction enterprise.
Success is usually measured by how well these undertakings meet the planned criteria in terms of cost, scheduling, and performance. But if performance requirements must indeed be met and are not lessened due to cost or schedule pressures, and if the timetable has some flexibility within limits as long as expenses are controlled, cost usually becomes the single most important factor in determining a program’s success. This is why most of the aspects discussed here relate to controlling that factor, in particular program acquisition costs. Sustainment over the life of a submarine is generally much more expensive than acquisition. However, the latter is usually the measure of how well a program does, and it is up to its manager to ensure the right steps are taken to properly address sustainment planning and the tradeoffs between acquisition and maintenance efforts. For any given program, assessing sustainment success will likely take decades.
Additionally, the scope here is mostly limited to experiences that can apply to any program, regardless of the country, political environment, supporting industrial base, budget limitations, or threats. Finally, specific lessons in the areas of requirements generation, acquisition planning, design, build, and sustainment can be only briefly covered here but are worthy of more detailed reviews.
Things You Must Get Right
Develop and maintain legislators’ trust: Submarine design and construction programs are among the most complex undertakings of a government. They are also among the strategically most important and usually well supported politically. Early, frequent, and open communication with legislators and their staffs regarding cost, schedule, and risks, while sometimes unpleasant in the moment, builds long-term trust and credibility. Ultimately, it helps to ensure the long-term funding needed for a multi-decade program. At the time the Virginia program first received multi-year funding, the lead ship had not yet been delivered, but the project demonstrated a real understanding of what needed to be done for it to succeed. This gave Congress confidence that it was moving in the right direction. That trust was and remains well placed.
A steady and reliable stream of support bolsters one of the most important ingredients that promote the realization of your mission:
Keep your program stable: As Michael Toner, former president of General Dynamics Electric Boat, once put it: “Three things are important to me: stability, stability, and stability.” In addition to consistency in long-term funding, it is important in many other areas, including operational and technical requirements that are firm and unchanging, personnel and leaders who make enduring personal commitments, and partnerships between the government and the private sector that are well established and lasting. From the contractors’ point of view, stability allows for investment in facilities and people with the confidence that they will pay off in the future. For the government, constancy facilitates steady improvement in cost performance and positive learning-curve results.
For the United States, another stabilizing factor is the leadership and overarching guidance across the entire nuclear-shipbuilding enterprise provided by the Naval Reactors organization. The abiding continuity of technical expertise, authority, and leadership that it provides forms a solid foundation and a way of conducting business that is well understood and followed by both government and industry. Such expert domain knowledge and direction is also evident in the U.S. Navy’s Program Executive Office, Submarines, which brings us to the next recommendation.
Make sure government is knowledgeable and informed: As the acceptance authority and user of the final product, a submarine, the government must be well-informed and up-to-date to make timely, correct, and cost-effective decisions regarding designer and shipbuilder technical recommendations and tradeoffs.
Making appropriate determinations involves understanding risk and settling on whether government or industry will bear it. This, in turn, means that roles and responsibilities must be clearly stated and, as they remain partners, that government and industry respect the boundaries. Whoever owns the risk must have the decision-making authority to take actions required to mitigate or retire it. To manage it aggressively, all parties should have formal risk and opportunity programs that are regularly supported by reviews with senior program leadership.
The United Kingdom and Australia, and to some extent the United States in its Supervisor of Shipbuilding commands, have lapsed in this area in the face of budget pressures. Having seen the consequences, they have made efforts to rebuild their capabilities. Lessons learned in the Astute and Collins programs have been particularly dramatic and have led to major efforts on the part of government to regrow or in some cases establish for the first time the domain familiarity and skills necessary to be a knowledgeable customer. This is timely for Australia as it considers starting its Future Submarine Project (SEA 1000), and for the United Kingdom as it assumes the design-authority role when the third Astute-class submarine enters service.
Budget challenges will only become more severe. One way to mitigate these is through cooperation. The United States, United Kingdom, and Australia have agreements in place that allow for the interchange of personnel and technical information. Expanding those arrangements may allow for more efficient and continuous use of limited resources. The ties of common interests and customs among all three countries are significant. This cultural affinity lowers transaction costs and enhances communication. Reading a plan or contract is important, but you also need to be able to read people.
Understand the impact of program gaps: Even though the United States has not experienced any true gaps in submarine production in the modern era, the Virginia-class program offers an instructive example. When General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding (now Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII]) teamed at the start of the program, EB had been continuously building submarines, whereas HII had experienced a ten-year hiatus from submarine production following completion of the Los Angeles-class program. In spite of ongoing government and EB involvement as well as significant EB assistance at the HII shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, the difference in production performance between the two shipyards was significant at the start of the program.
Ships are delivered alternately from the two companies, with the delivering shipyard responsible for approximately 70 percent of the performance for the vessels it delivers. For the first few ships of the class, the learning curve was not smoothly decreasing as expected, but rather a “sawtooth” decrease, with performance for the first submarine better than for the second, and so on. The issue was not that this level of functioning could necessarily have been avoided, but that it had not been properly anticipated, with resources applied to manage the situation.
Similarly in the United Kingdom, the gap between completion of the Vanguard class and the start of the Astute class contributed to early problems for the latter. Australia has a similar problem, as there has been no submarine-production work accomplished in that country since completion of the Collins class. Compounding this, Australia has never accomplished a complete submarine design in-country. The Collins class was based on a Swedish design from Kockums AB.
But at least there is recognition of this problem, which appears to be a factor in considering the planning and funding strategy for SEA 1000. Also, during the 2011 Submarine Institute of Australia’s inaugural Submarine Science, Technology, and Engineering Conference, one of the principal government speakers took the approach that SEA 1000 is not a program with certain start and stop dates, but rather the start of a continuous, evolving, and properly paced national enterprise involving submarine designers, builders, and the industrial base. The intent seems to be to avoid gaps in the future.
Whether it is more cost-effective to allow gaps and later rebuild capabilities or to pace work so as to avoid them is a decision each country must make. There are hidden costs associated with both approaches that are easily overlooked, but must be taken into consideration to ensure long-term success.
Involve all players who will eventually “touch” the ship: A wide variety of people interact with a submarine over its life, including fleet operators (sailors); maintenance personnel; designers and engineers for the hull and mechanical, electrical, weight, electronic, combat-systems, propulsion, signature, safety, acoustic, testing, and other fields; logisticians; planners and schedulers; those in the construction trades; quality-assurance personnel; program managers; and many others. Most need to be brought into the program early and learn to work together in a respectful, productive, and mutually supportive team environment.
In many cases there are competing priorities, as well as considerable differences and biases regarding how to approach issues. Every sailor wants his or her own bunk and personal space, maintainers want easy access to equipment, tradespeople want designs that are easy to build, logisticians want maximum commonality of parts, and so on. Yet the submarine is either weight- or volume-limited, and all work must be done within a certain budget and schedule. Tradeoffs and compromises are inevitable and must be conducted in a manner that, regardless of the eventual solution, acknowledges the value of and considers all points of view.
Do not underestimate the need for formal team-building training. This upfront investment was made in the Virginia program and resulted in integrated product teams: groups from several disciplines tasked with taking a holistic, or integrated approach to solving problems and obtaining results. They worked together effectively and, in the main, cordially.
Maintain transparency, openness, and alignment: The importance of open and honest communication with legislators to help ensure funding stability was mentioned earlier. Political support is important and must be continually cultivated. Other forms of transparency and openness are important as well.
First, team members need to maintain a policy of full disclosure with one another. If a budget cut is coming, figure out together how to deal with it. If an engineering issue is proving particularly difficult, a joint government-industry team may be the most effective approach to solving it. Two things to remember in a partnering environment, while they might sound a bit trite, are:
• Bad news doesn’t get better with age.
• Focus on solving the problem first and contractual consequences second.
In the United States, the submarine community is organized in such a way that it is hard to imagine the Fleet, Naval Sea Systems Command, Chief of Naval Operations staff, and other government agencies not being fully aligned when advancing a program. However, this has not been the case in Australia, as was evident during the conduct of the Collins-class submarine program. To ensure the success of the Future Submarine program, efforts will need to be made so that the Defence Material Organization, Defence Science and Technology Organization, Department of Finance and Deregulation, and Royal Australian Navy are all synchronized. And together with the designer and shipbuilder, they must then focus on their common goals in a unified way. Early indications are that the Commonwealth understands this and is taking steps to ensure a better outcome for the nascent program.
Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States are all democratic systems with robust free presses. Managing information that is released to journalists is important, and negative reporting on a program can be crippling. Open and articulate media managers, who also communicate with one another, are needed in industry and government to ensure effective proactive press engagement and that positive messages are publicized.
From Requirements Generation to Sustainment
The continuum of program events yields valuable information, from the generation of requirements to sustaining the delivered submarine. Much more detail is available in the previously cited RAND reports and in the 2002 EB publication on lessons learned “The Virginia-Class Submarine Program: A Case Study.” A summary of several important points follows.
Requirements Generation: As noted, firm and unchanging requirements are key to a stable program. To make this a reality, early collaboration between the operational and technical communities is a necessity. The latter designers, engineers, maintainers, and builders must verify that what the operational community desires is technically achievable at an acceptable level of risk and cost. It is lower risk to aspire to the “state of the practice” rather than the “state of the art” and to promote evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. Radical changes, all at the same time, in diving depth, propulsion (flank speed), payload handling, launch capability, and stealth, with the attendant integration effort, have been attempted in the past and led to cost and schedule blowouts. Up-front, well-considered, achievable requirements—stated in terms of a range from threshold (minimum) to objective (aspirational)—as well as agreement on how requirements will be tested, will minimize design and construction changes and allow for on-budget and on-schedule program performance.
Acquisition Planning: This factor, including contracting arrangements, varies considerably from country to country. However, the guiding principles in all cases should be openness; consideration of what is fair to all parties; establishment of an environment that fosters collaboration, incentivizes performance, and enables competition at the appropriate levels; and avoidance of what the UK National Audit Office calls “the conspiracy of optimism,” or the tendency of everyone involved to underestimate risks, challenges, and needed resources. Leadership that continually focuses on the common goal is essential. Generally, contracting for the design, first ship, and other ships under construction before the first is delivered should be in a single contract on a cost plus fixed-, award-, or incentive-fee basis. Thereafter, a fixed-price arrangement is appropriate. Realistic cost and schedule estimates are essential, and incentives should be tailored to achieve the results desired. Logical decisions regarding ownership of risk must be made. Change management must be formal and well understood by all concerned. And adequate management reserve, determined by the level of technical risk, should be established to deal with contingencies.
Design and Build: At a high level, some aspects of this topic have already been addressed, such as the need to involve appropriate stakeholders early in the design process. Other mandates include rigorous oversight of design margins and not starting construction until all arrangement drawings and most of the detail design drawings are complete. Computer-aided design and construction models are very useful in mitigating construction risk. Build the submarine multiple times electronically before constructing it in steel. Just as collaboration in design is important, so it is on the deck plates during construction. The Navy program office must have a strong presence in the shipyard during this stage and testing. Finally, to orchestrate all activities in this phase, the program must have a single integrated master plan and schedule that everyone follows.
Sustainment: Planning for this needs to start at the beginning of the design process. Physical maintenance accesses and on-board equipment-removal paths or routes must be accommodated in the submarine’s basic arrangements. A disciplined approach by a strong manager is essential to maintain the sustainment budget early in a program. As reserve funds are consumed during the design and build phase, it is tempting to raid the sustainment budget to take care of immediate concerns. Lack of funding sustainment and planning may not be noticed until years into the future. But if you use that budget to lower acquisition costs and mitigate design and build issues, this may easily result in inadequate resources to support the long-term goal of achieving lower through-life and total program costs. An adequate sustainment budget is needed early in the program to conduct proper maintenance and modernization planning.
Every recommendation presented here is the result of issues that arose in U.S., UK, and Australian submarine programs. In many cases the problems recurred from one program to the next within a single country or across two or all three nations. In other words, the lessons were not really learned. They were misunderstood, misapplied, forgotten, or ignored. Documentation of issues is just the first step in the learning process. It is up to the government and industry partners in the Ohio replacement, Vanguard replacement, and SEA 1000 program to truly learn, remember, and use the experiences of predecessors appropriate to their circumstances to move toward success in future submarine-building programs.