DDG 1000 moves forward as budget battles fade - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

DDG 1000 moves forward as budget battles fade

Devoid of much fanfare and defying the expectations of critics, production of the Navy’s DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer program is steadily moving forward.

In June, the program weathered a Nunn-McCurdy breach — a budget-control measure triggered by the jump in per-unit cost when the Navy decided in 2008 to “truncate” the class from seven ships to three — and in early July awarded the first contracts to begin fabrication of the third ship. With work now proceeding on all three ships, program manager Capt. James Syring turned over his duties Aug. 6 after nearly five years at the helm of what is arguably the most complex surface warship ever built.

The program, according to Syring, is still meeting most of its cost targets — a claim he first made a year ago. But he declined to cite a figure for cost growth on the first ship, projected to cost about $3.3 billion.

“We track CPI [cost performance index] and cost performance, and every contract at this point is above a 0.9 CPI,” meaning no contract is 10 percent or more over budget, he said. “The majority of the contracts are within 1 or 2 percent.”

The CPI is a measure of cost efficiency, computed by dividing the budgeted cost by the actual cost.

Syring said the ships’ design has seen only one significant change in the past year: In the spring, the Navy deleted the Volume Search Radar from the ship’s Dual Band Radar during the program review triggered by the Nunn-McCurdy process.

Although the radar works, Syring said, “producibility problems” with the radome material protecting the S-band radar persisted, and the Navy’s 2008 decision to base future missile defense on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and its Aegis weapon system eliminated the needed growth path for the VSR on the Zumwalts.

Raytheon’s X-band multifunction radar, the other half of the DBR, will meet all of the ship’s requirement capabilities, Syring said.

Moreover, software modifications will someday give the X-band some volume search capability, although the development of that software is still some years off, he said.

Syring said space and weight will be reserved for a future radar. Meanwhile, development of the VSR continues for the new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers.

The Nunn-McCurdy review also pushed back the building schedule of the first ship by about five months; delivery is now scheduled for December 2013. Then comes combat system testing and other work, so Zumwalt won’t be ready to deploy until 2016.

The building schedule for the second and third ships has not been affected, Syring said.

Meanwhile, construction of various components for the 600-foot-long, 15,500-ton Zumwalt is moving right along, and the ship is about 20 percent complete. Syring detailed progress on a number of the ship’s systems.

“We’re 100 percent into fabrication,” he said. “We’re still at 148 for the crew, still a 30-knot ship. Essentially, the design is done.”

Assembly of hull sections is going smoothly, he said.

“We haven’t had any interface problems with these larger zones [sections] coming together in terms of these things matching up,” Syring said.

The first of two 155mm Advanced Gun Systems for Zumwalt is complete, built by BAE at Fridley, Minn., and has been shipped for proof-firing to the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Testing continues for the Long Range Land Attack Projectile, the rocket-assisted bullet the AGS will fire. The shell has yet to reach its intended 87-mile full range, but the last test, in January, shot a LRLAP shell 63 nautical miles.

“We’re working through some software issues and some rocket-motor issues at the component level,” Syring said. “Minor at this point, but development continues on track.”

“The integration risk down the road of those technologies is still out there,” Syring added. “We’ve done an excellent job, I believe, in managing that risk over the last eight years, but in the end, it has still not delivered. It will deliver.”

Capt. James Downey, former program manager of the now-defunct CG(X) cruiser program, relieved Syring. With the star of a rear admiral, Syring will go on to relieve Rear Adm. Terry Benedict as the program executive officer of the Navy’s Integrated Warfare Systems effort.