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Hybrid sailors drive LCS anti-sub module

SAN DIEGO — The gray-hulled boat cut a clean line along San Diego Bay, zipping by small sailboats, lingering at times as its onboard systems scanned the surface and below.

Sonar Technician 2nd Class (SW) Benjamin Jett was driving the boat, but he wasn’t aboard. Instead, he was sitting at a computer console inside a portable container.

It was part of a Sept. 18 demonstration at Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command at Naval Base Point Loma, Calif., a day before the rollout of the antisubmarine warfare mission module to be used on littoral combat ships.

The ASW module includes a pair of robot boats that operate on the surface as sonar platforms, along with a robot submarine that carries its own sensors. An LCS also will use its unmanned helicopter, the Fire Scout, and a human-piloted MH-60R Seahawk helicopter to track and attack enemy submarines. The Navy previously rolled out anti-surface and anti-mine modules for the ship, which is expected to deploy in four years.

For 15 members of the ASW Detachment, the day showed what the littoral combat ships’ busy pre-commissioning unit has been working on at Naval Base San Diego.

Sailors with the small detachments must learn more skills and take on more responsibilities as the Navy shifts toward more automation and smaller crews for the littoral combat ships and their mission detachments.

The detachment’s sailors, all experienced sonar technicians, have spent much time with the unmanned vehicles and systems at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I. It means not only hitting the books to learn new technologies, but also greasing hands to learn the ins and outs of the diesel marine engines the sailors will have to operate and maintain when they deploy.

“We’re not going to have engineers in our pockets,” said Sonar Technician (Surface) 1st Class (SW) John Yearwood, 28.

STG1 (SW) Dale Barkley has collected a half-dozen new naval enlisted classifications, including sonar supervisor, sonar specialist and diesel marine engine overhaul. The 29-year-old completed courses in crew-served weapons operations and repair and attended rigid-hull inflatable boat coxswain’s school and quartermaster school, where he learned “to plot our own routes.”

“This is like hybrid sailors,” he said. “There’s fewer people to do more jobs.”

Sailors say they’re embracing the automation. Newer technology “really helps us manage it,” Barkley said. “Automation helps take a lot of the stress off of us.”

The unmanned surface vehicle, the main platform for the ASW systems, is an integral part of what the sailors do. “This is our baby,” said Yearwood, sonar supervisor for the demonstration who has served with the detachment for two years.

The vehicle’s array of cameras and sensors, including infrared radar, feed instant data to monitors and computers in the support containers. But it’s no video game.

“I don’t get to hit the reset button,” Yearwood said. “It’s a million-dollar boat.”

Along the way, the sailors have suggested some simple changes — tag lines on the engine’s dipsticks and hand brakes for a pallet jack, for example — and are helping write instruction manuals that will be used to train junior sailors.

While they take on more skills, the sailors also get to specialize: One crew member is the go-to sailor for network issues; Jett took quickly to the unmanned vehicle; Yearwood’s job on the boat “is to keep the diesels running.”

The ASW package’s big-picture goal, sailors say, is to “unman the front lines.”

“It keeps the fight far from the ship. It keeps sailors out of harm’s way,” said STG1 Blair Ransom, 31.

Instead of sending sailors on boats to sweep a minefield, for example, the Navy can deploy unmanned surface vehicles. “We can sit in a relatively safe area on an LCS and drive the equipment to an area where you wouldn’t want to go,” said Lt. Cmdr. Andre Pyatt, the ASW detachment’s officer-in-charge. “It’s certainly more expendable than a sailor.”

The $46.3 million ASW mission package is part of the $197.6 million in total developmental costs and the production of two mission packages, with a goal of deployment sometime in 2011, said Capt. Mike Good, program manager for mission modules.

The Navy plans to buy 16 of the ASW mission packages, along with 24 mine warfare and surface warfare packages — that’s 64 mission packages in all — for the planned fleet of 55 littoral combat ships, he said.

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Philip Ewing contributed to this report.