Changing Standards

Future warships will embody the conversion to commercial technologies, guidelines

By OTTO KREISHER, Special Correspondent

The Navy’s push to use commercially available products and standards in lieu of traditional, and typically more costly and time-consuming, military specifications will reach unprecedented levels in two classes of warships now being developed.

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and the DDG 1000 class of destroyers will incorporate the maximum use of open architecture and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology in their computing systems, electronics and other equipment. The ships also will be the first U.S. Navy combatants built according to more commercial-like standards for the hulls and major structures.

The Navy has long pursued the use of COTS technologies for its computerized systems and other equipment inside ships. Many of the standards and criteria being applied to the LCS and DDG 1000 stem in part from pioneering work under way on the service’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines.

Capt. James Shannon, the program manager for major combat systems open architecture at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), said the Acoustics Rapid COTS Insertion program for the subs’ sonar system is “blazing the trail” for the Navy in the use of commercial technologies and the development of systems that can be updated more easily and rapidly. The purpose of the insertion program is to adopt a common sonar system in place of the four now in use, and enable the service to increase its computer power at a rate more akin to the pace of the commercial industry, according to the globalsecurity.org website.

An open architecture, or general blueprint, for ships’ systems means they are standardized, transferable to other platforms and able to accommodate a variety of software applications. In 2002, the Navy began to abandon its outmoded approach of purchasing stove-piped systems built for single uses and never designed to work in a networked environment.

“The Navy is really moving out fast on this, perhaps faster than the other services,” Shannon said.

For example, the DDG 1000 “started off differently than other ship programs,” with cost and manning constraints and “kind of a blank sheet of paper” for specifications, said Robert Martin, Raytheon’s director of software for DDG 1000. In response, Raytheon developed a commercial-like “enterprise server-based architecture. … We tried to draw the best from the commercial computing environment for our software,” he said.

NAVSEA officials and industry representatives observed that COTS systems can be “ruggedized” by putting them into racks and cabinets that protect them from shock, heat or other harmful conditions they would encounter in a warship.

On DDG 1000, Raytheon is going one better, Martin said. It is packaging its large enterprise servers, which provide the basic processing system for the “total ship computing environment,” into modules or rooms that are shock-mounted.

“We let the room itself be the shock mitigator,” he said.

For the LCS, General Dynamics is using an open architecture approach that “enables us to integrate leading products as they become available,” said Michael Tweed-Kent, general manager of maritime digital systems at the company’s Advanced Information Systems unit.

General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin are building different versions of the LCS for Navy tests, demonstrations and possible production.

The Navy plans to buy 52 LCSs, which are intended to perform a variety of missions, including countering mines, submarines and fast-attack craft in the crowded littoral or coastal waters. The ships are expected to cost about $300 million each and the mission modules, which will enable an LCS to perform any of those assignments, could cost nearly the same. The number of modules has not been determined.

The DDG 1000, formerly DD(X), is intended to be a multimission combatant but primarily designed to provide high-volume and long-range fire support for ground forces using its two 155mm cannon and more than 100 missile tubes. The Navy hopes to buy seven, but Congress is balking at the high price tag, currently about $3.3 billion each.

The LCS and DDG 1000 will serve as test cases for a newer and more dramatic change in Navy standards: the use of commercial-like specifications for major structural elements of a warship.

The mechanism for this change is a lengthy document called the “Naval Vessel Rules,” which was created about two years ago in a joint effort by NAVSEA and the American Bureau of Shipping ( ABS), a government-created organization that has set standards for the design of commercial ships since 1862.

The new rules replace the Navy’s General Specifications, which were canceled in 1998 because they were out of date, said Howard Fireman, director of NAVSEA’s Future Concepts and Surface Ship Design Group.

ABS already had a long history of working with parts of the Navy and with other U.S. government ship operators, such as the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Maritime Administration and the Coast Guard. Half of all U.S. government vessels and about one-third of all U.S. Navy ships constructed in the last decade were built to “ ABS class,” or standards, according to NAVSEA documents.

Most of those Navy vessels are auxiliary, support and cargo ships operated by the Military Sealift Command, which classes all its ships with ABS. But unlike those support vessels, which usually operate well away from hostile forces, LCS and DDG 1000 are designed for combat and must be able to absorb damage and stay in the fight.

That will limit the move toward commercial guidelines in the construction of warships, said Rear Adm. Kevin M. McCoy, NAVSEA’s deputy commander for ship design, integration and engineering.

“There are things that are always going to be military unique,” he said. The challenge is to minimize the use of military unique (requirements) and maximize the use of commercial specifications, “consistent with the warfighting mission and the safety of our sailors.”

That means the Navy would pay for military unique equipment and structures only “where we really need it,” McCoy said, while taking advantage wherever possible of “the latest technology, the creativeness, innovativeness and economy of scale” of the commercial market.

For example, computer-aided design and computer modeling and simulation are allowing LCS designers to build structures lighter because they know more about the stresses they will face and how the materials they will be using handle such stress.

Glenn M. Ashe, ABS vice president for government operations, said the classification process starts by identifying “a set of relevant criteria that everyone subscribes to as being sufficient to represent the fitness and safety of a vessel.” ABS engineers then use those criteria, or rules, to evaluate the design of a ship and “to make sure the design comes in compliance with the rules.”

It also is essential that the rules being applied are relevant to the platform, the mission and the environment in which the ship will operate, Ashe said.

“It’s very important that if you’re going to classify a naval ship that you use rules that are oriented — designed for — a naval ship,” he said.

McCoy said the Navy foresees the application of the Naval Vessel Rules to a large number of vessels from cargo ships to non-nuclear surface combatants, but not to nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers.

An important element of the rules, McCoy said, is a companion process to encourage shipbuilders to propose substantial savings in cost, schedule and weight by using a commercial alternative. That process has produced about a thousand requests, of which about half were accepted, he said.

The effort to have LCS and DDG 1000 classed by ABS under Naval Vessel Rules has not been perfect, McCoy said.

“There are cultural issues,” he noted. “There’s a new player. Before, there was the government and the shipbuilder. Now it’s the government, the shipbuilder and ABS.”

Joe North, LCS program director for Lockheed Martin, said the rules “are a positive step forward, allowing industry to introduce other methods or solutions, design and production requirements.”

The U.S. Navy is trailing many of its allies in this use of commercial classification for naval vessels. There are 10 members of the International Association of Classification Societies, including ABS, and most work on naval vessels.

The use of commercial-like standards for ship structures, as with the earlier move to COTS equipment inside, is driven by the need to cut costs and delivery time for new vessels, Navy officials said.

The message heard repeatedly from NAVSEA and industry officials is that the Navy had to change its ways to have any chance of building the 313-ship fleet envisioned by Adm. Mike Mullen, chief of naval operations.

“We’ve done probably the most extensive review of what our requirements are for the U.S. Navy,” McCoy said. “That requirement is for 313 ships. To have that 313-ship Navy by 2025, we have to build about 200 ships between now and then. So we can’t waste scarce resources buying to specifications we don’t need.”

And because of the “greatly compressed design and construction time constraints on LCS and the very tight cost constraints,” he added, “I don’t think we would have gotten there” using only military specifications. “We had to go down a new path.”