Warship Construction Is a Critical and Urgent Challenge

When it comes to surface combatant construction, there are some fundamental truths: 

• Cost growth is out of control and unaffordable.  
• Delivery time frames are excessive and not commensurate with operational need.  
• Frequent government-generated, often complex change orders increase cost and impose delays.  
• Continuing resolutions have become a seemingly permanent part of the ship construction budget process, causing cost growth and time delays.  
• The current Pentagon and congressional budget process is antiquated and incompatible with warship construction and operational demand.  

Bottom line: The Navy must do two things if it is to succeed—deliver ships on schedule and budget and maintain production rates to stabilize the industrial base and meet operational demand.  

So, with that baseline, can surface combatant construction be “fixed”? 

It can, but it will require breaking many Navy, Department of Defense (DoD), and congressional rice bowls, including how we approach ship design, selection, and construction. And it will not be easy, as many of those rice bowls are armor plated.  

The first step is to recognize we can no longer think in terms of building and fielding individual classes of ships. For example, the Navy set a goal to build a state-of-the-art next-generation destroyer. But that was never the real requirement. The real requirement is to build and put to sea a total force of warships, support ships, submarines, and aircraft capable of defeating any sea-based threat to the nation. Boring down into that top-level requirement, the Navy needs a family of surface combatants that collectively can perform all their required missions, today and into the future. 

Second, we must select that surface combatant force, build it, and put it to sea not on the most convenient or cost-effective timeline, but on the timeline imposed by our future enemy. Some would argue that our potential enemy’s timeline is approaching at far greater speed than we are moving, especially with regard to surface ship construction.  

But before laying out what the construction program for this family of surface combatants looks like, we should look at our history, which offers some telling lessons.

The Bad and the Good  

The littoral combat ship program is an example of what the Navy cannot do. A concept that started as a low-cost support ship that could move material and people at high speed in coastal areas where air and sea dominance were assured morphed into a frigate-like combatant. In other words, instead of a ship well suited to unburden surface combatants from menial but important tasks, thus extending their service lives and reducing maintenance costs, we created a ship ill-suited to the frigate role and too expensive and overdesigned to cost-effectively fill the menial roles. The Navy has never met a new ship it cannot make harder and more expensive to build with mission creep.  

A second misfire was the Zumwalt class. Zumwalt was a well-intentioned program to build a state-of-technology destroyer, complete with a transformative hull, a revolutionary propulsion and power-distribution system, and an unproven combat system. In other words, it was a high-risk construction effort. Needless to say, for many reasons it did not work. The Navy now has three destroyers of limited utility, with extremely high life-cycle costs, that provide only a limited meaningful contribution to the construction of other combatant classes.  

Conversely, the Navy has a very successful program to emulate. The Spruance program produced a destroyer with limited combat power but a revolutionary propulsion system, housed in a very large (at the time) hull. Some observers questioned the practicality and affordability of such a combatant, but by design and/or a bit of luck, the Spruance (DD-963) was the perfect ship for the time. It was the firstborn of a family of major combatants that will defend the nation for up to a hundred years.  

From that foundational propulsion system and hull large enough to support an evolving family of combat systems, the Navy built and put to sea the Kidd-class destroyers (later upgraded with the New Threat Upgrade antiair warfare system), Ticonderoga-class cruisers, and follow-on Aegis cruisers with land-attack cruise missiles and ballistic-missile defense.  

Along the way, the Navy spun off the Arleigh Burke class, using the proven propulsion system and Aegis combat system in a new-design destroyer hull.  

This evolutionary approach has yielded a proven family of combatants capable of addressing a rapidly evolving threat.

What’s Next  

Learning from this experience, the next surface combatant needs to be the foundational ship for the next family of combatants that will have the watch for decades to come. It should be a destroyer with the latest proven Aegis combat system. Taking a lesson from the Zumwalt class, it should have an overdesigned and robust power plant capable of supporting the next-generation Aegis system and not-yet-fielded directed-energy weapons. This plant should be integrated into a very large hull with the internal and topside space for cost-effective retrofit and/or new construction integration of state-of-technology combat systems as they are developed and proven. After all, who, when they saw the Spruance, was thinking that hull and propulsion system would some day have to support a ballistic-missile-defense combat system?  

Concurrent with fielding this foundational destroyer, we should pull out the stops in developing the next Aegis combat system, the system that will keep the Navy capable of meeting the threat to the turn of the century and beyond. As soon as that system is proven, we should phase out the destroyer line and start building the cruiser on the destroyer hull and with its propulsion/power distribution system.  

This approach would: 

 • Eliminate time-consuming, expensive analyses of alternatives for clean designs.  

 • Reduce new-class startup risks, costs, and delays by using proven systems
 and designs.  

 • Provide shipyards stable production lines for hulls and propulsion and combat systems, which would support cost-effective design, construction, learning curves, advance and bulk procurement, and workforce stability and proficiency.   

 • Improve force maintenance and logistics support, reducing costs and achieving higher operational readiness, by employing significant common equipment and parts across ship classes.  

 • Allow the Navy to set contractual limits on change orders. The Navy and shipyards could then use contracts in which shipyards are incentivized to deliver on time and penalized for
late deliveries.  

 • Provide stable throughput that would deliver ships commensurate with operational requirements and allow shipyards to work at or closer to optimum efficiency and effectiveness.  

 • Stabilize a critical portion of the U.S. industrial base before it reaches the point of no return.  

The Navy can reap these benefits if we recognize that warship construction is a challenging, multifaceted, national undertaking that can be successfully addressed only if the military, industrial, and budgeting components undergo major coordinated change—change that must start at the top. The President should charter under the Secretary of Defense a National Security Board of our brightest non-political minds to assess and craft a plan to address the threat and its closure rate, the industrial base and its atrophy rate, and the budget process as they relate to shipbuilding and national security.  

The military ship construction management process should be transformed to better use oversight, lessons learned, and accountability: 

 • Extend applicable program executive office assignments to eight to ten years (think Rear Admiral Wayne Meyer). 

 • Reestablish a four-star position to oversee critical warship development and fielding to align ship construction more closely with operational need. This would not be Navy Material Command reborn. It would be a position of authority and influence similar to that employed in the Navy’s nuclear power program. For example, this commander would approve change orders, serve as a central peer coordinator with operational commanders, and be a powerful advocate to show Congress the damages imposed by continuing resolutions.  

 • Transition from annual budget submissions, which empower congressional and DoD political employees and tend to create instability in programs, to biannual multiyear budgets, which support consistency in operational requirements and stability and cost-effectiveness in the industrial base.  

This will be hard. It will require breaking rice bowls built over decades and necessitate major budget realignment. It will require discipline, commitment, compromise, and recognition that this race is a marathon. We win only if we maintain the pace and stay the course.  

At the beginning of World War II, the United States was behind militarily and industrially. When the proverbial light bulb came on, the nation mobilized and, at great price, achieved victory. In doing so, it broke untold rice bowls. We can do it again, but only if we are willing to shed light on the problem and recognize that national security is at stake. There is no time to waste.