The design center’s semi-submersible platform may be its most important concept yet

By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor

The concept for the Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) — a new type of vessel proposed as a linchpin of the Pentagon’s sea basing concept — is the work of a design bureau called the Center for Innovation in Ship Design (CISD), a partnership of the Naval Sea Systems Command, the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Carderock, Md.

CISD was chartered in October 2002 to develop ship designs that will be part of the Navy of the future. Based on its short history, the center is off to a fast start.

The CISD staff has had a hand in developing and testing a variety of advanced vessels such as the Sea Fighter, an experimental catamaran based in San Diego; the E-Craft, a fast, twin-hull ship with a center section that can be raised and lowered to handle troops and vehicles and transport them rapidly ashore; and the Sea Lion, an experimental combatant craft to support special operations forces.

But the MLP may be its most important concept yet. The proposed ship’s tentative place at the center of the Pentagon’s sea basing concept would make it a key element in future operations as U.S. forces are deployed to world trouble spots. [See related story, page 20]

Under its charter, CISD is the “hub of a national collaborative enterprise” that brings together “a distributive network of scientists and engineers, highly skilled in ship design and its various subdisciplines.” Some of its principals are located at the Naval Surface Warfare Center and it is guided by a leadership council of senior scientists and engineers from the three sponsoring agencies.

CISD is chaired by John T. Leadmon, director of the Submarine Design & Systems Engineering Group at Naval Sea Systems Command. The chairmanship rotates every two years. The center is assigned five full-time staff members. The rest of the staff hold full-time positions in their respective organizations and are assigned to the center on a collateral basis.

The various staff members are organized into design cells within three major groupings: ship design, ship design tools and sea basing. Experts from the faculties of colleges of naval engineering — as well as students — and the shipbuilding industry are involved as needed.

The creation of CISD was led by Rear Adm. Jay M. Cohen, then-chief of naval research; then-Rear Adm. Paul E. Sullivan, who was deputy commander for integrated warfare systems at the Naval Sea Systems Command; and Rear Adm. Michael G. Mathis, then-assistant deputy commander for surface ship technology at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. They drew in experts from their commands to staff the center.

In addition to the MLP, CISD was involved in formulating the idea of the Advanced Logistics Delivery System, a concept of a ship to launch unmanned gliders that would resupply expeditionary forces ashore. The center also has done work on high-speed sealift vessel concepts — large, fast ships capable of transporting massive loads of cargo — for the Army and Navy, focusing on technologies it believes merit the attention of the Office of Naval Research.

“We did 25 concepts last year and about 40 the year before that,” said Howard Fireman, director of the Future Concepts and Surface Ship Design Group at Naval Sea Systems Command and a member of the CISD’s Leadership Council. “Most of those things no one ever sees because they are for official use only.”

Many are advanced concepts generated in response to requests from the Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. The ship concept projects are funded in large part by the three CISD partner agencies, and to a lesser degree by the Coast Guard, the defense industry and other agencies. Most actual ship design is performed by shipbuilders such as Northrop Grumman or General Dynamics and naval architectural firms such as Gibbs & Cox, Arlington, Va., based on Navy concepts and requirements.

The process involves bringing together “the best and brightest from government and industry to make sure the Navy ultimately gets the right product,” Fireman said. “The Navy has to be very heavily involved because, ultimately, we’re going to be the user and operator.”

Producing concepts for new ships is not the only function of CISD. It is charged with helping to revitalize and sustain naval engineering education in the United States, developing innovative ship designers and generating the technology base to support the Navy’s education and design initiatives. In an era when the output of engineers from U.S. universities is declining, the competition for engineers is growing more intense.

One of Fireman’s responsibilities is to forecast the number and skills of engineers needed 10-15 years in the future. The Navy’s sea enterprise — the range of activities involved in designing, procuring, testing and maintaining ships — employs approximately 18,000 engineers nationwide and overseas. The onset of a wave of retirements from federal civil service during the next decade is a concern to the Navy’s engineering establishment.

“It takes about 10 to 15 years to create a ship design manager,” Fireman said. “All these folks are a national asset. I don’t have 15 years to develop the next generation because in 15 years there’ll be no one left.”

CISD is a means of attracting to the Navy the human capital, especially engineers and naval architects, necessary to support its future ship design and acquisition.

The CISD even extends its outreach to school children. In collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the CISD distributes to high-school students Sea Perch kits, with which they can build small autonomous water vehicles and gain an early appreciation of the physics of the marine environment.

The CISD helps pay for summer internship programs for college-level engineering students from such universities as Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass., in order to compete with engineering firms in the intense battle for engineering graduates.

 “When we hook them young, we have a higher probability of retaining them [in the naval architecture and engineering field],” Fireman said.

Some of the summer interns built a model of a Mobile Landing Platform and tested it in a tank.

“The kids worked with some experienced engineers and the idea gained traction as we went through the sea basing [concept],” said Jeffrey Hough, director of operations for the CISD. “The product we’re getting is very good,” he added, noting that some interns have been hired since graduation and are starting their first jobs at Naval Sea Systems Command.

As far as the Navy is concerned, one of the shortcomings of naval architecture and engineering education in the United States is the emphasis on designing offshore oil rigs and offshore supply vessels, and other civilian craft, rather than warships.

“Half my class wanted to [design] America’s Cup [racing sail] boats,” Hough said.

Two years ago, the CISD collaborated with universities — the University of Michigan, Virginia Tech, the University of New Orleans and the Naval Postgraduate School — to design the nation’s first course in surface warship design in the United States, according to Hough.

Fireman and Hough taught the prototype class last summer at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the first college to confer engineering degrees in the United States, according to Hough, and one involved in the design of shipping for the Great Lakes. A second class is scheduled this summer.

The curriculum should be intriguing. CISD, which was heavily involved in the design of the forthcoming replacement for the Tarawa-class amphibious assault ships, is working on concepts for a high-speed sealift ship, a deep-water stable crane ship, a floating sea base hub, seaplanes as sea base connectors, high-speed connectors and ways to lighten total ship construction.