The Fixer
The naval services rely on Rear Adm. Bill Landay’s PEO for remedies
to some of their toughest problems, including deadly IEDs in Iraq
As the Navy’s program executive officer for Littoral and Mine
Warfare, Rear Adm. William E. Landay III, has a mission greater than
the sum of his many programs. His job is to help the Navy and Marine
Corps develop the capabilities needed to gain access to the littoral
regions of the world and conduct operations there as long as necessary.
The naval services’ focus on shallow-water operations requires
a host of new technologies, including mine warfare machines that he
said “will fundamentally change” the way mines are detected
and neutralized.
Landay also has one of the more controversial and onerous research
and development missions in the military today: finding ways to detect
and destroy the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that have killed
or maimed hundreds of Marines and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is a challenge, said Landay, because each bomb is different, in
contrast to the days when the Navy maintained an ever-expanding body
of knowledge on, for example, Soviet mines, and developed standard
methods of detection. There has been a lot of progress, he said, but
there “is no high-tech silver bullet” that will nullify
the dangers of IEDs.
A Naval Academy graduate with 26 years of service, Landay has been
commander of the destroyer USS Paul Hamilton and held an array of acquisition
posts, including fleet support officer for the Aegis program and C4I
program officer for the U.S. Transportation Command.
At his offices in the Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C.,
Landay discussed the broad responsibilities of his department, or “PEO,” with
Seapower Editor in Chief Richard C. Barnard
Your department manages about 210 programs and covers a lot of turf.
What is your chief goal?
LANDAY: The focus of this PEO is to help develop the capability to
assure access to the littorals by the Navy-Marine Corps team. We reorganized
our acquisition community about three years ago. Our littoral programs
were spread throughout the Navy. We decided if we were really going
to do this right, we needed to bring those programs under one PEO.
We’re involved almost exclusively on the surface and under the
water. The air threat in the littorals is similar to the air threats
further out, so we don’t get involved in that.
What are the capabilities that will help assure that access?
LANDAY: We’re focused on seven key areas: mine warfare, unmanned
vehicles, Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) mission modules, explosive ordnance
disposal (EOD) for all the services, Navy and joint antiterrorism force
protection programs, all Navy special warfare programs and maritime
surveillance systems.
A lot of the leap-ahead technology that we’re going to do over
the next year or two is in the mine warfare area. We’re developing
the AQS-20, which is an advanced mine-hunting sonar, and an airborne
laser mine-detection system that allows us to find surface mines. And
there are some unmanned vehicles, including a remote mine-hunting vehicle
that will search for mines in a particular area for 24 hours. Those
are significant steps forward that will fundamentally change the way
we’re doing mine warfare.
In terms of a more immediate impact on warfighting, we are doing some
very interesting things in our Navy special warfare and EOD communities.
Tell us about those fundamental changes in mine warfare. What do you
hope to achieve?
LANDAY: The Navy’s vision from Maj. Gen. [Gordon] Nash, [director
of the Expeditionary Warfare Division], our mine warfare sponsor, is
to get Marine and Navy people out of that minefield and do the mine
warfare job faster. The whole push now is speed.
Today, the mine countermeasure ships and the MH-53E mine-hunting helicopters — which
require a large ship for operations — basically require the ship,
with all the people on it, to go into the minefields and try to find
the mines. With our mine warfare package, you still have a helicopter
[the MH-60S] flying over, but it operates with a much smaller footprint
and we can operate it from the LCS, destroyers and cruisers. The [WLD-1]
Remote Minehunting Vehicle is unmanned. We put it into the minefield,
and the manned ships stand off, evaluate the information and direct
the operation.
We did comparative tests, and with the reconfigurability of the LCS
and these new systems, we were able to sweep the same area in 25 percent
of the time with the same or better [mine] clearance rate compared
to the old systems. It is significantly different.
When do you plan to have something in the field?
LANDAY: We will deploy the first mine warfare mission module package
in ’07 on the first LCS. In ’07, we also intend to put
one of our Remote Minehunting Vehicles on a [Arleigh Burke-class] destroyer.
That package will probably not include the full mine warfare capability.
The five organic systems that are coming off the [MH-60S] helicopter
include the AQS-20, the airborne laser mine-detection system, the towed
Oasis [Organic Airborne & Surface Influence Sweep] and the airborne
mine neutralizer. The last element is a 30mm gun with special projectiles
that we’re going to use to engage the near-surface mines. For
budgetary reasons, we moved that out to the right. So four of those
five capabilities, and certainly all of the detection capability, should
be available to the fleet for that initial deployment. Then we will
begin producing them in numbers.
What progress is being made to detect the modern diesel-electric submarines
in littoral areas where there is other traffic and ambient noise? Is
this one of the chief challenges before the Navy?
LANDAY: Correct. Well, there are a couple things. We have a program
called Advance Deployable System (ADS), which is a deployable [sensor]
field. It’s predominately passive and there are some challenges
in the littorals, but it’s a field that is being developed to
operate in that environment. The sensor arrays give us a very broad
area search.
Are you satisfied with the development of this system?
LANDAY: The arrays we’ve put in the water have performed extraordinarily
well. We have tested them against other peoples’ diesels in littoral
environments, and we’re getting remarkable achievement out of
them.
We have some very rigorous requirements, and there are technical challenges
related to processing the information gathered by the arrays. Normally,
the signals processing for a search task is done by a submarine, which
has a large processing capability. I’ve got to do a lot of it
in a buoy, and then transmit the information from a buoy to a ship.
So the packaging is different, and we’ve got to be sure we know
how to manage that. We believe we do. We want to send the information
from the ADS sensor arrays through a buoy and transmit it some distance
to an LCS and eventually to other platforms. Right now, the processor — that
middle piece — is our bigger challenge.
What else are you doing to detect the diesel electric submarines?
LANDAY: Helicopters with dipping sonars are very effective in that
environment. The LCS may carry one helicopter, but our goal is to have
multiple dipping sonars available, some operating from unmanned vehicles,
for example.
The ASW (antisubmarine warfare) package for an LCS also will include
our low-frequency active sonars. Today, we have very large, high-power
arrays and we are shrinking them down to operate off the HSVs (High
Speed Vessels). The Navy is doing a lot more work in littoral ASW with
submarines and large surface combatants. Those programs are outside
this PEO, and we’ll leverage that technology.
What happens when you put these various elements of your ASW package
together and test them against a modern diesel-electric in shallow
water?
LANDAY: We hope we’re going to find the submarine. Part of our
challenge right now is that the pieces of the package are still in
development. A lot of ASW technology was brought to bear in the Navy’s
TASWEX (Task Force ASW Experimentation for Assured Access) ’04
exercise in the western Pacific last year. We brought two ADS arrays
and a dipping sonar operating off an 11-meter inflatable boat [to simulate
operations from an unmanned vehicle]. All of the analysis indicates
both performed very well in conjunction with the other task force ASW
technologies that were out there.
In mine warfare, you sound very confident of fundamental improvements — a
breakthrough, if you will. Will there be a breakthrough in ASW detection
against this particular threat?
LANDAY: That’s hard for me to answer. In the ASW world, this
PEO is a small piece of the larger Navy effort. I don’t know
that any of us would say, “Hey, we’ve got it wired.” But
everything I see tells me that we are making progress. This is a hard
threat.
Are you curtailing production of the Long-Range Mine Reconnaissance
System (LMRS)?
LANDAY: Yes. We made that decision about a year ago. The challenge
of LMRS was we wanted a 21-inch diameter vehicle so it could be launched
out of a torpedo tube. Its sole focus was mine reconnaissance. The
submarine would launch [it] out of a torpedo tube, it would go off
and do mine reconnaissance, come back and be recovered in the torpedo
tube while the sub was moving. This would allow the sub to go off and
do other missions, come back and recover the LMRS. They didn’t
have to put divers out or use dry deck shelters. The sub didn’t
have to trail stuff out of the torpedo tubes, which restricted the
submarine’s operational availability. That was the challenge
on LMRS.
As time went on, there were some changes in that program, and we realized
it was hard to pull this thing back into a torpedo tube. So we’ve
transitioned to a program called Mission Reconfigurable UUV (unmanned
underwater vehicle). It has a 31-inch diameter, and we launch and recover
it out of the torpedo tube. All the things we’ve learned with
the LMRS will be leveraged into this program. This will be multimission,
in contrast to the single mission LMRS. We will have different mission
packages for it and a lot more flexibility. We’re still developing
the strategy.
At this point, what are the missions you have in mind, in addition
to mine warfare?
LANDAY: ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) has a
big role. There are some ASW roles that people are interested in. We
have a UUV master plan that identifies nine areas of increasing focus,
and those are the key areas.
We hear that progress is being made to deal with the improvised explosive
devices that have killed so many in Iraq. What’s going on?
LANDAY: As you can imagine, that’s a big focus for everybody.
One of the things we have developed is a joint system called the man-transportable
robot system. It’s something a couple of guys can carry around.
It has cameras. It has articulated arms. The EOD technician can send
it in to evaluate a threat. If there is something that he needs to
disarm, he can put certain tools on it, and send it back and actually
[perform] disarming techniques.
It gets that EOD technician away from the bomb. You’d like to
be able to do that job remotely, particularly in an environment where
the technician may be threatened by the exploding device, [and] also
by somebody sitting in a building trying to snipe at him while he’s
doing his job. We have moved the man-transportable robot very quickly.
Our original plan was to deliver about 200. Now it’s on the order
of 1,200.
Why has it been so difficult to come up with roadside explosive device
remedies?
LANDAY: We are dealing with a very flexible enemy. There is a lot
of technology available to him every day that would not have been available
10 years ago. Today, you can buy model cars, fobs for your cars, cell
phones. And these things can be used to make bombs.
Every explosive device is different. I can find a 150mm mortar shell
and to that I improvise a detonator that’s controlled by the
same key fob that unlocks the door to your car. It doesn’t need
to be real sophisticated. There is no super high-tech silver bullet
to counter these things. I think the EOD community would tell you that
they’ve made a lot of progress. When a guy gets killed you ask, “Why
can’t you fix that?” Another question is how many guys
haven’t gotten killed because of things they have effectively
done?
CORRECTION: Due to a transcription error, Seapower misstated the size
of the Mission Reconfigurable UUV (unmanned underwater vehicle) in
the October “Interview” with Rear Adm. William E. Landay
III, the Navy’s program executive officer for Littoral and Mine
Warfare. The UUV has a 21-inch diameter.
