In December, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that the U.S. Navy’s next surface combatant, in effect a frigate, would be a modified version of the current littoral combat ship (LCS). His main justification for this decision was that the need for the new vessel was too urgent to wait for a drawn-out (and expensive) competition; better to go with what the Navy is already buying. Many critics of the LCS, which is optimized for high speed, were stunned. The world’s navies are awash with frigate-sized warships that appear to meet U.S. requirements. The Coast Guard’s national security cutter would also seem to approach the Navy’s needs. What is happening?
The answer lies in a change to defense procurement policy pursued in the late 1990s. Procurement policy must be the dullest issue in defense, but some of its aspects have enormous consequences. In this case the key was a decision that the Department of Defense should behave more like a business. Instead of doing development work in-house, it should rely entirely on contractors, just as a law firm, say, buys its computers and software from vendors.
Until the late 1990s, the Navy conducted its preliminary design work in-house, although in recent years it had often gone to competitive bids for the designs it actually bought. It must have seemed to those looking at overall defense procurement practices that doing in-house design work was the survival of the earlier quaint practice of developing weapons, the discredited “arsenal system.” Surely full competition, as in aircraft design, was the wave of the future. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) canceled Navy plans to conduct an in-house design study for what became the Zumwalt-class destroyer.
Internal preliminary design had a subtle value. Those who lay out the requirements for a new ship, such as the degree of stealth demanded in the Zumwalt class or the high speed of the LCS, cannot have much sense of what their desires imply for the size, shape, and cost of a ship. Different requirements interact in what naval architects call a design spiral. The LCS requirement included both high speed and substantial endurance, and there was a cost cap. In reality, within a relatively small hull (whose size might be set by the cost cap), high speed normally precludes great endurance. To get more endurance, a ship has to be stretched (to add fuel). That increases resistance and makes it more difficult (and expensive) to achieve a given speed. It might be that a perfectly satisfactory ship could be built at a reasonable price to make, say, 35 or 40 knots, but once the contract documents showed 45 knots, no one in industry was going to offer any design other than one meeting the expressed speed requirement. Anyone proposing a lower-speed ship could not, by definition, win the contract.
Sticker Shock
The point of preliminary design was to show, in a simple way, what the requirements would mean. Often those setting requirements were astounded by the cost associated with what seemed to them to be minor improvements. In one case, in the 1950s, requests for added endurance and for a new sonar turned a missile destroyer into a missile cruiser, to the fury of those setting the requirements (they ended up buying the cruiser). As might be imagined, those setting the requirements were never particularly glad to find out that the ships they were asking for were nothing like what they thought they wanted. The situation was tolerable, to the extent that it was, only because the conflict was resolved inside the Navy. In the case of the Zumwalt class, eliminating the preliminary design step ultimately led to what might be called severe sticker shock. It is possible that a small retreat in the stealth requirement would have led to a far more affordable ship, but without the internal discussion process that could never have happened.
When OSD decided to change the system, no one in the Navy appears to have stepped forward to defend existing practices. That was not a matter of hostility to the preliminary designers. It was almost certainly more a matter of the sheer murkiness of procurement policy, and the failure of the Navy to understand just how different and how valuable its ship-design practices were. OSD was preaching the virtues of open competition compared to the supposed stodginess of the Navy’s internal designers. The proof offered in 1997 was the fruit of an open competition for the abortive arsenal ship. Civilian firms that had never been “tainted” by naval practices offered ships with really small crews, hence far less expensive to operate than those sketched by NAVSEA. Some of the innovative ideas might have worked, but no one will ever know; the arsenal ship was never built. No one in OSD seems to have realized that unless one of the innovative designs was turned into steel, the idea of dropping the stodgy Navy designers had not been tested.
Nor, it seemed, did anyone step up to defend the Navy’s designers. They had produced the best warships in the world before, during, and after World War II. They had been remarkably innovative. For example, Navy designers produced the World War II LST, the modern fast submarine, and the heavy aircraft carrier (which required a new kind of hull structure to make it practicable). There was, for example, a reason why U.S. submarines with half the power output outran early Soviet nuclear-powered submarines. It was the U.S. Navy, not any other, which introduced the vertical launchers that make modern anti-aircraft systems efficient. Of course, some foreign designers were outstanding, particularly in niches the U.S. Navy did not emphasize, but on the whole the Navy was extremely well served by its designers.
The preliminary-design idea was also used in aircraft design. The Bureau of Aeronautics (later NAVAIR) had an organization that sketched aircraft to meet the requirements the Navy levied. The service did not build the airplanes its designers sketched, but used their work both to evaluate the feasibility of the requirements it levied, and also to evaluate the designs offered by commercial firms. The process, including the preliminary designs, is reflected in the files of the old Bureau of Aeronautics. This process produced, among many other aircraft, the F-4 Phantom, by far the most successful jet fighter of the 1960s. At the least, the lesson of U.S. Navy aircraft design was that it took solid engineering capacity inside the service to buy the right sort of aircraft.
Wish Lists
None of this is to reject the virtues of private industry. It is to say that before private industry was asked for a new ship or a new airplane, someone inside the Navy had to see whether the combination of demands made on industry made sense. It is absurd to imagine that companies dependent on the Navy for their livelihood will tell the service that what it is asking for is impossible to produce. The disastrous story of the A-12 Avenger, a proposed stealthy attack bomber, shows what happened when preliminary design could not be carried out. During the 1980s, stealth technology was so secret that it could not be disclosed to the large design team inside NAVAIR. NAVAIR in turn was hard-pressed to say whether the companies offering stealthy designs could produce the aircraft. For their part the companies were under intense pressure to offer whatever the Navy thought it wanted. Grumman won the competition but was unable to produce a prototype A-12. The contract had to be canceled.
In effect, wish lists of requirements, which were never vetted to see how different requirements might interact, now become lists of contract requirements. Moreover, any change in requirements after the requests for proposals were issued and contracts let has become quite expensive. That is inherent in the current process; it is not some stupid consequence of badly drawn contracts. Navy shipbuilding has always suffered from the cost of changes ordered after a design has been approved, but the more basic the change, the worse the cost.
The LCS reflects two alternative approaches to achieving very high trial speed, as per the contract. A subtle but unfortunate effect of demanding a particular feature, such as high speed, is that other requirements fade in importance as the competitors are judged on specifics rather than on overall design quality (which is difficult if not impossible to quantify). Did LCS really have to be a 45-knot ship? In this case it did not really matter whether high speed was the most important feature desired, because once the list of requirements had been published, any change would be extremely expensive. Criticism of particular requirements was pointless because there was no way to unpick the package. Nor did anyone have a mechanism that would show which requirements had had which effects on the design as a whole. In the case of the LCS, it was sometimes said that reducing power (i.e., accepting lower speed) would have saved very little money. The real question was whether a ship designed from the outset for a lower speed would have been a better idea, but that could not be asked without a preliminary design organization in place.
What Secretary Hagel was saying in December was that opening up the requirements question now would also be unaffordable. Better to adapt what is being built, whatever its flaws. Perhaps it is time to go back to the future, and resurrect an in-house preliminary-design organization for the Navy.