Responding to now-outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s directive to the Navy in his Fiscal Year 2015 budget to “submit alternative proposals to procure a capable and lethal small surface combatant generally consistent with the capabilities of a frigate,” Navy leadership has proposed incremental changes in the existing hulls of the littoral combat ships (LCSs).1 While the improvements in the “up-gunned” LCSs—announced in December—are welcome news to the vocal critics of the ships, those actions unfortunately do not reflect the vision or the necessary planning for the next generation of warships.
In today’s maelstrom of confusion of strategic goals and resource constraints, considering new designs seems a low priority. Without an outside incentive to change or improve the warship classes presently under construction, budget methodologies and economic realities discourage new starts. Yet the experience with the warships constructed between the world wars suggests that revisiting designs on a regular basis yields better results than very long construction runs.2
With this history in mind, now is the time to begin developing the next designs—not only a new frigate, but also eventual replacements for the Arleigh Burke and Virginia classes as well. Even though the turmoil caused by the Budget Control Act and sequestration promises few real opportunities for near-term building, the time to start thinking about the next set of warship designs is upon us. Ten years is not too long to conceptualize, design, evaluate, assign directors and staff, create plans, draw specifications, authorize, fund, contract, and construct.
The Process Should Start Now
In a period when future technology remains very expensive, and resource availability is unpredictable, proceeding deliberately is a wise course. But the procession must begin if successful ships are to be available in the next decade. The first step in this process is achieving a consensus on the size and shape of future ships. Leadership to create this vision is less a matter of seniors’ directions than an organizational consensus created by experienced officers with the cooperation of experienced shipbuilders. Looking elsewhere for direction begs the issues in which the Navy should be the most expert. The goal should be to seek a bottom-up consensus while being careful to avoid a top-down order. The creation of the task force by the Chief of Naval Operations to examine alternatives to meet the secretary’s direction is just such a move.3
While every officer has an opinion on the mission and design of warships, this organizing function cannot be a senior officers’ debating society but a cabal of dedicated, knowledgeable, and respected officers, engineers, and builders who represent all aspects of the mission, design, and execution of the program. Careful consideration of options and trade-offs take time. The initial step in such an effort is not in knowing the exact missions or functions these ships are intended to execute. Rather, the key is conceptualization based on corporate history and personal experience connected to imaginative but not fantastic views of technical developments. In dealing with the characteristics of a future weapon system that will have a long life, analytical calculations, depending as they do on factual data, are much less useful and vastly less accurate than a sense of corporate history, sound technical foundations, and personal experience at sea. Penetrating the fog of the future requires insight rather than analysis.
Define the Design ‘in General Terms’
The outcome of this initial effort is to define in general terms the warfare requirements the ship is to fulfill. While this heresy flies in the face of the mandates for precise description of a proposed weapon system in order to measure its worth against a variety of alternatives to get approval in the budget process, for a ship that will take 10 years to create and lasts 30 more, this definition is pretty much what its predecessors do or did. Some facets, such as geography, are fixed and can be predicted. On the other hand many of the situations the ship will face in its lifetime remain to be revealed.
The answer is not to try to exactly describe the missions the ship will face in great detail but to define in general terms the warfare requirements the ship is to fulfill. Thus the first order of business is to envision a ship that can perform customary tasks while retaining the flexibility of being modified when new missions, weapons, and situations arise. To accomplish this sort of design, analysts and computers are less important than seamen warriors, their naval architects, and a sense of organizational and maritime history.
The easy part of this first phase is reflecting on past and present ships of similar classes and types. Though the future may be hard to visualize exactly, in most ways the warships of tomorrow will be much like those now in service. Understanding what each did well and why they could no longer function in modern circumstances or where they did not live up to their expectations is a start. Identification of areas needing improvement or change follows. Some of these will be technical and some will be process. Research to develop technical answers can follow, and process improvements tried immediately. The product of this phase is not a “wish list” but a set of characteristics designed to meet a range of goals in the maritime and wartime environments in which the new ships will operate.
More Space and Power Needed
Make no mistake: this task starts easily but quickly becomes hard work. In the case of the frigate, getting credible combat power in a lightweight warship is not a trivial task. More space and electrical power for the railguns and lasers are improvements sure to be required on the next set of surface warships. Autonomous underwater vehicles are already part of submarines’ equipage and will intrude on designs of future surface ships as well. Other ideas lurking in the laboratories of the Office of Naval Research will need to be considered—even though likely to be back-fitted rather than incorporated into the initial designs.4
Despite their preferences, this definition phase should not be a product of the combatant commander’s (CoCom’s) desires. CoComs have insatiable appetites, and their attention is too focused on immediate operational issues to be able to accurately predict what may be needed by their reliefs’ reliefs’ relief. Nor should it become mired in the analysis of alternatives types of processes that absorb time and money with little effectiveness.5 Rather, the discussions and arguments that go into generating the concepts must be a considered and serious study by officers experienced in the domains in which the ships will operate. Initially, general statements of systems (e.g., hull-mounted sonar) or as-yet undeveloped equipment (e.g., high-energy low-mass electric generators) will suffice, but as the studies proceed these must become specific enough to allow costs to be estimated so trade-offs can be made. Iteration is sure; cost will be a driver and will cause a retreat from coveted characteristics at almost every step.
Acknowledging at the early stages that many factors will be unknown lays the basis for realizing the ships will have to be modified to meet the conditions that actually prevail at the time of their employment. Reserve weight and space for growth will be important. Excess electric-generating capability and cooling capacity are likely to be more valuable than anything else in accommodating coming weapon systems. Berthing and messing beyond the bare engineering estimates are operators’ concerns, and here their participation is vital.
Identification of advanced technologies and engineering developments necessary or desirable are among the most important issues for the near future. Recognition of areas in which history and experience do not provide all or enough answers is also important so that experiments and operations can be conducted to add depth to the bodies of knowledge associated with the various aspects of the new ships’ capabilities. Care has to be taken not to demand technological advances that cannot be accurately described or to integrate so many capabilities that the product becomes unbuildable.6
Find A Champion
A pitfall throughout the process, but particularly in the planning stages, is to demand the state-of-the-art or even advanced technology while disregarding the likely cost or time scales. When a technology is in the development stage or the process or procedures are not known or understood, leaving room for eventual incorporation is a better plan than blundering into a wilderness no matter how promising.
Problems with existing ships should be viewed as opportunities. The difficulties associated with the LCS now becoming evident as these ships go into service offer lessons to be incorporated into new designs. This calls for facts rather than conjecture about steel hull versus aluminum, trimaran versus monohull, plug-in module versus installed systems, as well as regard to concepts such as speed versus endurance, crew size and habitability, routine self-maintenance versus intermediate maintenance activity support, multimission or niche, personal skills required and the associated schools, and logistic support during deployment. Each issue represents a potential prenatal solution.
When making these estimates, participation of prospective shipbuilders and design organizations should be involved as well as the Navy’s own naval architects. Investing in this early expenditure repays itself severalfold as the project proceeds. The product is the single-sheet design on which the shipbuilders can estimate costs and schedule. The research-and-development community can identify near-term goals for new technology, and programmers can begin the steps to add the ship to the master shipbuilding program.
The product of this operator-designer study is a baseline of concept and requirement. Protecting it over a long term requires a high-level champion who has the fortitude and power to defend and discipline the process and can muster the necessary service-wide and political support. Admirals Hyman Rickover and Wayne Meyer immediately come to mind, but others have shepherded the Arleigh Burke, Virginia, and Knox classes of warships and the carriers. With the platform sponsors in the Office of the CNO (OPNAV) now third-tier officials, identification of these champions is problematical no matter how necessary.
The second step in creation takes place in the halls of the Navy Department, the Pentagon, and the Naval Sea Systems Command. While no steel is cut or electrons moved, the paper war is a serious venture without which the ship remains a figment of the Navy’s imagination. A “promoter and protector” in OPNAV would answer the multitude of queries from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, White House, and Congress. This job would also include oversight and execution of required legalistic details of high-priced acquisition programs. This can be extremely effective in maintaining the baseline and freeing Naval Sea Systems Command to execute the program.7
Recent experience in the management of warship construction has not been encouraging. The difficulties are by no means limited to advanced Western countries as the problems in building programs in China, India, and Russia indicate. But experience in programs in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia demonstrate some difficulties that are likely to be common regardless of location, society, or political structure. At the same time, construction of the Virginia submarines and Arleigh Burke destroyers indicate that successful programs are possible.
The most common feature of all the poor-performing programs is the suffering inflicted by repeated changes in the government’s direction. History suggests the higher the level of government involved in any decision the more serious the damage that may be inflicted. Political leaders are prone to ignore long-term results of their actions, rarely understand technical aspects of complex programs, often are lured into traps of fads of business concepts, too often disregard the advice of those knowledgeable on the subject, and make decisions based on economic or political factors without regard to the impact on the actual program or ship.
A Royal Handicap
A capsule of this ineptitude was the case of the U.K.’s Astute- and Daring-class replacement programs.8 There the Royal Navy was handicapped by lack of managerial skills and in-house technical expertise. The resulting “conspiracy of optimism” of all parties and the technical incompetence at the level of decision-making was described by Sir Bill Jeffrey, then-permanent undersecretary in the Ministry of Defence and the department’s most senior civil servant who stated:
It is clear that what principally went wrong was that we were substantially overoptimistic about the time it would take to deliver this, about the technical challenge it would represent and about what it would cost. We underestimated the degree of technical risk.9
A shorter summary would be, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”
These difficulties are not isolated to the British Isles. Generally service organizations are better at predicting their mission needs and the associated technical requirements than any administrative overlord. Those not in the trenches lack appreciation of the environment, are influenced by considerations not germane to the subject, focus on resource conservation, and tend to be unsympathetic to complicated technical arguments.
To reduce the temptation for outsiders to interfere, as little fanfare as possible should be announced by government sponsors or promoted by builders in order not to raise expectations or invite critical input from people unencumbered by knowledge or experience. Declaration of the new ship’s capabilities as a “force-multiplier” is particularly fraught with peril. More than once a reduction in capability or numbers has been justified by enthusiasm for new capabilities that then served as a justification for budget-conscious planners to claim similar effects with a smaller number of assets. In the Daring case, incorporation of the Cooperative Engagement Capability was cited by the ministry as a force-multiplier that then became the reason for reducing the number of ships in the program by half. However, by the end of the procurement in 2012 the Cooperative Engagement Capability had disappeared from the description of the ship, the whole ploy intended to deflect criticism from the government’s decision to truncate an important building program.10
Throughout this process, moving from one stage to the next ought not to be done too quickly. Plans must be reasonably sure before suggesting the ship be bought. Trade-offs between ship’s characteristics (concept) and cost (construction management) have to take place before design development can be completed. Programming by necessity starts prior to the design being fully completed and well before construction can begin. Even though sandwiched between the two stages, programming actually starts before the design is complete and continues until after the class is finished. When any one of these three steps is shortchanged and not sequenced with sufficient time in the schedule, the product will probably be late, cost more than expected, and be less capable than the original vision.
Planning for a new ship is not complete until the process for execution of the program is established. All the requirement work can go for naught without careful planning and preparations to execute the work.
A key reason some programs succeed and others do not is the longevity of the managers—both those of the builder and of the Navy. In poor-performing programs, the naval officers managing the program and overseeing the builder rotated out of their assignments in less than half the program’s life. In successful programs, not only did responsible officials remain in their jobs, but the governments’ technical staff was competent, adequately sized, and on scene. When difficulties arose, negotiated solutions between the Navy and the shipbuilder resolved those issues quickly—generally at minimum cost and rarely with need of legal action. The relationship between the builder and the buyer were not confrontational or aggravated.11
Unless there is a corporate commitment to building a ship well and a government commitment to cooperating with the shipbuilder over the long haul, the project is doomed to difficulty. The U.S. Navy’s defense in such cases is vigorous oversight, clear and precise specifications, and mature designs. When the government personnel stay on their jobs long enough to develop a thorough understanding of their tasks as well as the character of the shipbuilder, his suppliers, and the attitudes and abilities of the important civilian managers, the results can lead to contained costs and timely completion.
Naturally, construction of ships in the shipyard of a commercial vendor creates problems. The constructors’ aim is maximum profit, while the government aims to get the most ship at the least cost. Failure to recognize these two diametrically opposed positions at the outset creates problems ameliorated only when designs are mature and technical competency exists on both sides. These situations become complicated when government officials view “profit” as a dirty word.12
The assignment of individual engineering duty officers in the Virginia class almost from the conception of the ships until delivery of the first few set the stage for continued reduction in costs and construction length.13 In England, the Ministry of Defence relied on consultants. As a consequence:
. . . the department relied on the commercial builder to provide data on the project progress, cost and risk. The builder continued to be optimistic about project progress and the department was not well placed to challenge the builder’s assumptions.
Furthermore, the project team was unable to communicate problems up the chain of command, suggesting an impervious bureaucratic structure and a senior management overwhelmed by operational concerns. All of this translated into the Royal Navy’s never having a full appreciation of what was happening during the building process, either of the builders’ activities or of costs in time and budgets.
Beware the ‘Fixed-Price Contract’
The last crucial error is the fixed-price contract. Even when the design is final, changes will become necessary as it becomes clear during construction that the planned design was inadequate. Fixing the price of the initial contract shifts all the risks in the design to the government. Each physical change creates a contractual change; every change to the contract is an opportunity for the builder to recoup losses suffered in some other part of the project. The fixed-price contract for finished products when the content is clearly understood and several vendors compete is a concept from the business model for retail trade. It is not a model for the construction of warships.
The longtime practice of building the first of the class on cost-plus basis, so as to have a foundation on which to intelligently fix the price of subsequent ships, was abandoned in the name of competition—in a market with one buyer and one seller! During the period between the two world wars, the United States maintained a shipbuilding capability in its own yards in order to have a clear understanding of both the technical risk and construction cost. When time came to negotiate prices with a commercial builder, those two parameters were well understood.
Navies are not immune to making mistakes, sometimes intentionally, in estimating the costs of a particular project. The natural inclination of all buyers is to underestimate the costs to reduce the hesitancy of a parsimonious and reluctant backer. When a new construction is constrained by funding, reduction of planned armaments or sensors that can be fitted later can be deferred—preferably in the design phase. As naval commentator Norman Friedman has documented, backfits can prolong ship service life if other factors in the ship are healthy.
None of this is magic or exotic: Most has been discussed in detail in Proceedings and other professional literature. Now is a propitious time to undertake these efforts on all ships but especially on the surface warships: Captain Wayne Hughes’ flotilla ship and the Arleigh Burke destroyer replacement in addition to the frigate.14 By doing all three at once, the trade-offs between platforms can be more easily appreciated and duplication eliminated where warranted.
1. Chuck Hagel, Secretary of Defense, “Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2015 Budget,” 15 February 2014.
2. Thomas C. Hone and Trent Hone, Battle Line (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006).
3. Grace Jean, “Make or Break Year? The U.S. Navy’s LCS programme in 2014,” Jane’s Navy International, April 2014.
4. Ronald O’Rourke, “Statement Before House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, on the Navy’s FY2014 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan, 23 October 2013,” on Spruance-class upgrades.
5. Daniel Goure, “Twenty-Five Years of Acquisition Reform With Little To Show For All The Effort,” Facebook, 25 March 2014, www.facebook.com/dan.goure.5.
6. Elinor Sloan, “Canadian Defense Commitments—Overview and Status of Selected Acquisitions and Initiatives,” Center for Military and Strategic Studies, Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute, University of Calgary, December 2013.
7. RADM Millard Firebaugh, USN (Ret.) to author. (RADM Frank LaCroix, USN [Ret.], performed this function for the Virginia class).
8. Discussed in detail in CAPT John L. Birkler, USNR (Ret.), John Schank, Mark Arena, Jessie Riposo, and Gordon Lee, “Strengthening the Shipbuilding Industry,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (December 2013), vol. 139, no. 12, 40.
9. Ben Lombardi and David Rudd, “The Type 45 Daring-Class Destroyer: How Project Management Led to Newer Ships,” Naval War College Review (Summer 2013), vol. 66, no. 3.
10. Ibid., 105.
11. RADM John D. Butler, USN (Ret.), “The Sweet Smell of Acquisition Success”, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, (June 2011), vol. 137, no. 6, 22, and CAPT John S. Heffren USN (Retired), “How to Build a Better Submarine”, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (December 2012), vol. 138, no. 12, 46.
12. Butler to author, 4 April 2014.
13. RADM Millard Firebaugh, USN (Ret.), Seminar, “Seawolf and the Maritime Strategy,” Naval Historical Foundation and Naval Submarine League, Washington Navy Yard, April 2013.
14. Sample starts are described in LCDR Matthew Smidt and CAPT Michael Junge, USN, “A Modular Warship for 2025,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (January 2014) vol. 140, no. 1, 28; and Ronald O’Rourke, “Navy DDG-51 and DDG-1000 Destroyer Programs: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, 4 February 2014, 23.