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New ship designs promising, but untested

Like no other military service in history, the Navy is betting a very large — and expensive — chunk of its future fleet on untested technologies and unprecedented practices. Large destroyers built to a hull design no one has ever ridden. Aircraft carriers launching planes by a method yet to send a single aircraft aloft. Littoral combat ships operated in ways new to any navy.

The projects have been in the works for years: more than a decade for the DDG 1000 destroyer, about that long for the CVN 78 carrier and about five years for the LCS.

But now all three projects are at something of a nexus: After years of existing only as promises and PowerPoint presentations, all three projects are about to turn into real ships. The service is about to begin building the destroyers, construction has just begun on the first of the new carriers, and the first LCS will take to sea in a few months.

That the Navy is depending on so many untried designs at once is epic. And these new ships do not represent modest leaps: The Zumwalt-class destroyer in particular is one of the most technologically advanced ships ever built, combining at least 10 major new technologies into one 15,000-ton package.

To reduce risk, the Navy often has introduced new technologies in small steps. The first nuclear-powered warship, the Nautilus, added a nuclear reactor to an otherwise conventional hull design. The first Aegis combat systems rode on a 1970s destroyer design. The Navy’s first vertical-launch systems for missiles replaced external launchers on the sixth ship of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers.

That step-by-step approach meant that teething problems with a new system didn’t hurt the entire design. And it provided a buffer in case a new technology failed.

In the early 1960s, the Navy laid plans to operate the unmanned DASH, the Drone-Anti-Submarine Helicopter. Dozens of older destroyers were rebuilt to incorporate a small flight deck and hangar. But technical obstacles prevented DASH from becoming operational, leaving scores of ships with new aviation facilities too small to accommodate manned aircraft. The empty flight decks were embarrassing, but the ships themselves retained enough capability to stay in service another decade or so.

Today’s Navy officials express confidence in their new ship programs, repeatedly reassuring Congress and other critics that the lengthy design and development period for the destroyer and carrier minimizes the risk of failure or even of serious delay.

But worries persist that the destroyer’s tumblehome hull design — so far tried out only in models — will be flawed, or that the carrier’s revolutionary electromagnetic aircraft launch system won’t be perfected before the ship is completed in 2015.

In terms of simple hull numbers, the potential impact of the new carrier or destroyer designs on the Navy’s 313-ship fleet plan is relatively small. The service plans to keep 11 carriers in service, building one every four or five years. Only seven Zumwalt-class destroyers are planned — although the tumblehome design is the Navy’s preference for 19 CG(X) cruisers, the first of which is to be ordered in 2011.

The success or failure of the new LCS concept has a far greater potential impact. Navy plans call for 55 of the ships, which ultimately will make up about one-sixth of the fleet.

‘A major sin’

Putting out so many untried designs at once is called “concurrent development,” said Norman Friedman, a New York-based naval analyst and author of a series of design histories of U.S. warships.

“It’s a major sin in acquisition. You’re not supposed to do it,” Friedman said. “Each platform involves major radical change. That suggests an optimism which past experience would indicate is misplaced.”

He decried the absence of a more deliberate approach to fielding new technology and concepts.

“There’s a fascination with radical change as a way of solving problems,” Friedman said, noting that the depth of institutional knowledge in the Navy dropped dramatically in the 1990s with the cost-saving elimination of much of the technical expertise at Naval Sea Systems Command, which oversees the design, development and construction of new ships.

“The Navy has dumped most of its internal technological expertise,” he said. “These designs are creations of private companies.”

Northrop Grumman performed much of the design work on the new destroyer and carrier, while General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin are offering competing designs for the LCS.

“What you’re seeing is that we’ve privatized defense contracting to where there are very few players,” Friedman said.

But another reason for so much change at once is that the Navy simply doesn’t build as many new designs as it used to. It costs billions to develop new ships — the service puts the research and development price tag for the DDG 1000 at about $6.5 billion — and Naval Sea Systems Command is working to reduce the number of designs to cut costs.

But starting so few new designs means the service needs to pack as much of a wallop as possible into each new ship. The last destroyer class was designed in the 1980s, and the previous carrier design dates from the mid-1960s. The need to show significant advances over the previous class is even more intense.

“Everything really matters. If you put it all in one package, that makes it matter more,” Friedman said.

The Navy also is building new classes of submarines, amphibious ships and support ships, two of which — the San Antonio-class amphibious transport docks and the Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines — had developmental, design or cost issues of their own. Handling so much that’s new at once would be a major challenge for any organization, analysts say.

“The introduction of several new classes within a limited span of years poses an acquisition management and supervision challenge for the Navy, and an execution challenge for industry,” Ronald O’Rourke of the Congressional Research Service said.

3 programs, 3 sets of risks

The carrier

The destroyer

The littoral combat ship

Affordability