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CG(X) off-limits at conference on CG(X)

Acknowledging that the Navy’s next-generation cruiser program is a “fairly controversial topic,” the service’s top shipbuilder warned attendees at an engineering conference not to expect too many details.

“We’re still in the early stages of development,” Vice Adm. Paul Sullivan, head of Naval Sea Systems Command, told a Crystal City, Va., audience Monday. “We’re not ready yet,” he said, “to discuss details” of the new cruiser, known as CG(X).

Sullivan provided the keynote address at the opening of a two-day conference sponsored by the American Society of Naval Engineers. The topic of the conference: “The Road to CG(X).”

Although the cruiser program “represents the very heart of the future surface Navy,” Sullivan repeatedly mentioned items that would not be discussed at the conference, including details of the super-secret Analysis of Alternatives for the ship, or discussions of the cruiser’s hull form, radar or missiles.

The AoA was to have been completed last November and publicly discussed before Christmas, but Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead sent it back with numerous questions. Service officials from Navy Secretary Donald Winter on down have repeatedly told reporters not to expect the report any time soon.

“There are lots of questions,” Sullivan said, adding that work on the AoA is a complicated process.

With a smile, he didn’t blame conference organizers, since ASNE began planning for the conference at a time when the AoA was expected to have been completed.

But one speaker questioned the Navy’s motivations at delaying completion of the cruiser analysis — or even to discuss the issues at hand.

“The longer the Navy delays the CG(X), it looks to others like they’re waiting for the next administration to take office,” Ron O’Rourke, chief naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service, said during a panel discussion following Sullivan’s address.

“There’s a road out there to the CG(X), but at present it is a decidedly unclear one,” O’Rourke said, speaking at the conference in his personal capacity.

The delay in the analysis, O’Rourke opined, isn’t due to some kind of paralysis.

“The Navy, I think, has its reasons for holding back, even if it won’t share those reasons with others.”

O’Rourke decried the Navy’s ambiguous positions on its shipbuilding programs.

“This is my 25th year of tracking Navy programs,” he told the audience of several hundred engineers. “I can’t remember a time when the issue of surface combatant procurement appeared as unsettled as it does now.”

Trying to figure out what the Navy is thinking, O’Rourke said, is “Kremlinology.”