Ship System Innovations Will Have Lasting Impact on Navy’s Future

By MARGARET ROTH
Sea Power Correspondent

The U.S. Navy’s transformation in the post-Cold War era has brought an array of high-tech innovations that captured the public’s imagination. As the nation struck back at al-Qaeda or fought to free Kuwait from Iraqi invaders, the public spotlight has focused on the Navy’s futuristic unmanned vehicles, super-automated mission-control centers and precision munitions.

But more mundane innovations in ships systems and operations also will have a lasting, though less dramatic, impact on the Navy of the 21st century.

Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, has an abiding interest in cutting the size of his force and using the money saved to upgrade the fleet. From 2003 to 2008, the service will eliminate 25,035 slots, or 6.5 percent of the force. One means to achieve that end is to make substantial reductions in the size of ships’ crews, which is driving a variety of high-tech innovations in ship systems and operations.

Experiments on both coasts in “optimal manning” under the leadership of Vice Adm. Timothy W. LaFleur, commander of Naval Surface Forces, have reduced the crew of the guided-missile destroyer USS Milius, for example, from 320 to 165.

The amphibious assault ship USS Boxer deployed with a crew that was 8 percent smaller. The guided-missile cruiser USS Mobile Bay cut its crew size by 11 percent. The experiments, which began in 2001 with the Milius, are continuing and have become a working model for the concept. This new way of thinking about ships’ crews is central to the design of the Navy’s newest ships, said Gregory L. Maxwell, deputy commander for human systems integration at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA).

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the DD(X) destroyer, the Virginia-class submarine and the CVN 21 aircraft carrier are being designed with an eye toward ways to make optimal use of technology and people, he said.

For the LCS, a cornerstone of the Navy’s Sea Power 21 strategic vision, the competing teams headed by Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics have been allowed a core crew of at most 50 people, preferably fewer. The Virginia-class submarines will have crews of 118 people, 12 percent fewer than the Los Angeles class. The DD(X) is being designed for a crew of about 150. The Navy ultimately wants to reduce the crew to 95, Maxwell said. For the CVN 21, the design requirement is for a ship’s company of approximately 2,500, 1,000 fewer than an existing carrier.

Behind the obscure phrase “human systems integration” lies a methodical quest to put fewer humans to better use on ships, through automation and less maintenance-dependent machinery. The result is reduced manpower, which accounts for about 60 percent of total ownership costs of Navy ships.

Yet “technology in and of itself is not necessarily the solution to any problem,” said Maxwell, who served 28 years in the Navy, retiring as a captain in 1997. It must be proven to help sailors do their jobs better.

“We spend millions and millions of dollars to ensure interoperability and all those things that make ones and zeroes talk to each other, and make sure that a system will stay online when you want to use it. And what do we do for the sailors? Almost nothing,” Maxwell said. “We put [new systems/warfighting capabilities] out there and we expect them to respond to that.”

In the LCS, slated for delivery to the fleet in 2006, the thinking goes like this: “As our folks are developing even mundane aspects of the design, [such as] fuel systems, they’re thinking about how is this going to work so that we can help reduce manning,” said Benedict P. Capuco, vice president of Gibbs & Cox Inc. Program Management Group and the Lockheed team’s chief naval architect.

Just as important, if not more so, Capuco said, is whether the work sailors do aboard ship is critical to running it, so they are “performing their mission, not spending a lot of time repairing pumps and doing maintenance items … and when they’re not doing their missions, having a little bit better quality of life, instead of chipping paint and cleaning bathrooms.”

“A competitive focus of … both industry teams” is to restrain the size of the LCS crew, said Martin L. Caldwell Jr., Lockheed’s program manager for LCS mission capability.

“It’s the Navy’s desire, as well as ours, to reduce the lifecycle costs of the ship,” said

James Baskerville, vice president for the LCS program at General Dynamics’ Bath Iron Works in Maine. “We’re trying to comply with a crew [size] on the order of 40.”

The General Dynamics team is incorporating highly automated propulsion and auxiliary systems in its design to allow for unmanned engineering spaces, for greater reliability with a smaller crew, said Baskerville, who declined to be more specific at this stage in the competition. The company’s design also uses low-maintenance materials, such as aluminum and composites, “not the traditional materials that you have to paint and sand,” he said.

Lockheed’s design for the LCS also calls for an unmanned engine room — nothing new to the commercial shipping industry, but a cultural shift for Navy ships. “There are still going to be engineers on board, and they’ll still be doing maintenance,” Capuco said. “But we don’t have to have someone in the engine rooms at all times.”

Also envisioned by Lockheed’s LCS team is a flight deck system of cables controlled by electrical actuators, instead of the hydraulically driven system currently used to capture helicopters and park them on the deck. It’s “something a little more simple, a little more elegant,” Caldwell said. “And I guess that’s kind of the key” to shipboard innovation.

Similarly, Lockheed has designed an overhead watercraft handling crane system for the LCS that could move watercraft, manned and unmanned, fore and aft or off either side of the ship, he said.

On the Virginia-class submarine, wireless technology will replace the clipboard in keeping logs. Thus “the sneaker net,” sailors walking around the sub checking on equipment and taking notes, can be put to better use. Touch-panel displays will allow the Navy to reduce the ship-control party from five people to two: pilot and copilot, said Capt. John S. Heffron, Virginia-class program manager at NAVSEA.

Some of the Navy’s developments in optimal manning are now in use, and one target of these innovations is damage control. By using automation, damage-control crews can gain up-to-the-minute information with which to better evaluate that needs to be done.

For example, NAVSEA is introducing the Wearable Fire Fighting Ensemble, a computer built into Navy firefighting gear with a touch screen, video, voice and data capabilities that allow damage-control leaders on the scene to communicate with central damage control. The result is that fewer people need be sent to the scene of the fire and therefore put at risk.

The system has been tested in fires up to 450 degrees. NAVSEA also has a number of projects of narrower scope, in various stages of development and testing, that would allow for smaller crew sizes, including:

¦ A self-cleaning lube oil strainer, continually cleaning itself and depositing debris on a filter screen for easy removal. The bottom line: $65,000 less spent each year for hazardous materials disposal, $15,000 less for equipment repairs and $21,000 less in lost lube oil. Fleetwide, the savings could be $4 million a year, and 100 sailor-years of work.

¦ Automated oil analysis. The system, using infrared and debris detectors, continually assesses the condition of the engine oil to predict when the bearings and oil will need replacing. This technology is also used at industry sites such as utility plants to reduce the need for maintenance checks and personnel. The savings: $15 million each year for engine repairs, $1.5 million for unneeded oil changes; $16.5 million a year fleetwide, and 250 sailor-years.

“You save yourself time and money on [maintenance] rather than doing it on a schedule, so long as [the system] is operating within specs,” said Kevin Baetsen, director of engineering at Military Sealift Command. “Every time you open something up, you’re bound to have some problems with it.”

“Condition-based maintenance” is also part of the Virginia-class submarine design, said Will Lennon, Virginia-class program manager for General Dynamics’ Electric Boat Co. “You’ll use that more and more.”

Military Sealift Command has already made a number of changes in shipboard operations to reduce manning. It installed self-service laundries, is using cameras to view gauges and meters remotely and has installed fiber optics to group controls on conveniently located touch screens. Sliding, hydraulically operated watertight doors — “which would be standard on a commercial ship” — now make it easier to move between engineering compartments, Baetsen explained.

Many of the innovations in ship’s operations are “just common sense,” he said. “What’s out there in commercial industry that’s been tried and proven, and can we adopt it?”

As the new-generation ships deploy, the Navy will find new ways to make them more efficient, Maxwell said. One of his long-term dreams is a common standard for tactical information consoles so sailors can have access to the information they need without having to consult multiple screens — a trying job on a calm day, never mind when decisions have to be made under the stress of combat.