Today’s ever-changing threat environment means the time is right to start relying on open architecture and an incremental roll-out of capabilities, Navy officials said Nov. 12 at Defense Daily’s Open Architecture Summit.
“There is a shift in how we set our requirements that’s happening–it’s hard to tell you’re in a revolution while it’s happening,” Program Executive Officer for Ships Rear Adm. David Lewis said during a flag officers panel discussion.
Lewis said he and other top officers–as well as many of the lawmakers that oversee the shipbuilding programs–grew up in an era where it took 15 or 20 years to design, engineer, build and test a new ship concept. “And in a Cold War environment, we knew what the enemy was doing or developing, so we could track that pretty closely and we could execute something like that.”
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| Rear Adm. David Lewis, Rear Adm. David Johnson, and Rear Adm. (sel.) John Ailes speaking on a panel at Defense Daily’s Open Architecture Summit Nov. 12. Photo by Dana Rene, special to Defense Daily. |
But, he said, today’s evolving set of threats and tight budgets mean “we just cannot afford to set this incredibly challenging 20-years-from-now warfighting requirement and then actually develop the system to do that, we can’t afford to do that today. So the idea is to put the architecture in place, put the processes in place, put an initial warfighting capability out there and then grow over time to meet that [long-term] warfighting requirement.”
Asked about congressional skepticism about the incremental and open approach to ship and weapons design despite the Navy increasingly relying on the concept–in the Littoral Combat Ship, the Aegis Combat System, the new DDG-1000 and much more–Lewis responded, “if you use the classic requirements setting–waterfall development kind of process–if you use that to judge these newer innovative ways of doing things, it doesn’t check all of the boxes appropriately.”
Capt. John Ailes, program manager for LCS mission modules, said he understood the frustration Congress has had as his program has come together over the years, but he added that as the systems work their way through final operational testing and reach initial operational capability in the next year or two, lawmakers will change their minds.
“I think part of Congress’ frustration over time was, there are a lot of systems, and they weren’t just mature systems being integrated, there was some real work that had to be done,” Ailes said. “But there’s just nothing like demonstrated success at sea that can build support.”
For example, he said, the mine countermeasures mission package’s Remote Minehunting System “had a very storied past,” but after a lot of focused work RMS can now reach “well over 200” hours mean time between operational mission failure instead of required 75 hours.
Ailes said after the panel discussion that the surface warfare package underwent testing on the Fort Worth (LCS-3) from Oct. 1-25 and “it was pretty darn close to flawless, it was really very good.” The 30mm and 57mm guns had experienced some reliability problems in previous testing but performed well last month, Ailes said, with none of the previous problems reappearing. The scenario-driven testing proved that the entire command and control chain – from the radars detecting a threat, sending information down through the data link, coordinating with helicopters flown by the aviation detachment, and so on – all operated as expected.
And Ailes said during his presentation that he thought the best was yet to come with LCS. The ship has three mission packages in development now–surface warfare, mine countermeasures and anti-submarine warfare – and all three interface seamlessly with the ship thanks to the Navy’s effort in creating a comprehensive standard interface control document. But, Ailes said, right now all three mission packages use three distinct types of software and therefore can integrate with the ship but not with each other.
“As we go forward, our plan is to provide greater commonality and eventually get to a common library across all three,” Ailes said during the panel. The original idea to build the mission packages around mature systems removed a lot of risk from the ship program, but “what we’re working on is, this year and working through [fiscal year 2016], is providing an underpinning so that all three of the software packages will have the ability to be ported from one to another, so eventually we can get to the point where we can have a customized approach to our warfighters’ needs.”
Ailes said that sailors on the first LCS deployment have already said they’d like to be able to mix and match capabilities from the different mission packages, and Ailes said that ability could come to the fleet in a few years thanks to the open, flexible nature of the program.
“The open architecture story across the Navy is, in many ways, a story of a good idea that is basically spreading throughout the fleet,” he told the audience.