By Geoff Fein
The Navy has to move toward an open systems environment in its surface combatants if it wants to avoid retiring ships too early and to keep pace with the burgeoning ballistic missile threat, a top Navy official said.
“When you build a ship, you have to be able to evolve it over the course of its life to meet changing threats. You wouldn’t want to build a ship that was tapped out from a stability standpoint, cooling standpoint, electric generation capacity standpoint, the day it was launched,” Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Integration of Capabilities and Resources, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“You need the ability to grow systems, for a reasonable cost, to meet the changing security environment,” he said.
McCullough pointed to the Navy’s past of decommissioning surface ships before they reached their estimated service life.
“The 993-class DDGs were decommissioned because we couldn’t evolve the combat systems much further from where they were to meet an evolving security threat. So they were decommissioned at 17 years or about half their life,” he said.
The same thing occurred with the Ticonderoga-class Baseline I, McCullough said. “We couldn’t evolve the combat system at a reasonable cost to meet evolving threats, so they got decommissioned at 20 years.”
The same thing happened with the Spruance-class destroyers. Those ships went out at an average of about 22 years, McCullough added.
“The average price of a complex surface combatant is around $1.8 billion today. You can’t be making that kind of investment and then taking it out of service half way through its life,” he said.
The Navy has been able to evolve the combat systems aboard the DDG-51-class ships, McCullough noted.
The USS Arleigh Burke (DDG0-51) first deployed in 1991. McCullough notes that the Arleigh Burke is nowhere near the ship that DDG-112 will be.
“With the proliferation of ballistic missiles, the improvement in capability of ballistic missiles, and just the sheer numbers, we were able to adapt that combat system through the addition of some adjunct processors and different computing code to be able to engage ballistic missiles. That was never envisioned when that ship was built,” McCullough said. “So that combat system has shown the ability to evolve and as we go into these ACBs (Advanced Capability Build) it will be able to continue to evolve.”
The initial ACB, McCullough explained, known as ACB 08, separated the hardware and software. The first ship to undergo this effort was the USS Bunker Hill (CG-52).
McCullough acknowledges that the software on Bunker Hill is not fully open yet, but by the time the Navy gets to ACB 12, all of the elements of the program will be open.
The Navy also plans to introduce integrated air defense and missile defense at extended ranges with the follow-on family of missiles from the Standard Missile (SM)-2 in ACB 12, McCullough said.
Raytheon [RTN] makes the Standard Missile.
“It will have in-stride ballistic missile defense (BMD) with a multi-mission signal processor, and the launchers get the appropriate upgrades to fire SM-3s,” he explained. “When we looked at where we were going with the DDG-51s and [DDG-]1000s, that modification program we put together for DDGs will allow that combat system, the ACB 12 combat system, to be dropped right into DDG-113, which will be the first new DDG under our revised DDG plan.”
Those new ships that the Navy has proposed buying instead of additional DDG-1000s would be built with extended range area air defense with SM-6s and in-stride BMD and would help the Navy get at the capability gap it sees evolving, McCullough said.
The Navy has been taken to task by Congress for what appeared to be a sudden change in direction, moving away from the Zumwalt class of advanced combat ships and restarting the Arleigh Burke production line. McCullough said a lot of frank discussions went into making that decision.
“I have had several classified briefings with staffers and members to explain how rapidly the threat has changed over the last three years. It’s hard to talk about that in an open hearing,” he said. “I’ve told the acquisition and technical authority people this repeatedly, ‘the DDG-1000 was an evolution from arsenal ship to Surface Combatant 21 to DD(X) to DDG-1000, and the capability requirement for that ship was developed in the early ’90s and matured as its design went along. But it’s predominately a land attack ship and that’s what it was built for.”
There are some things that have changed in the global security environment in a rapid pace that outstripped the capability set that DDG-1000 was designed to combat, McCullough said. “Once we got to that point, we really had to look at what we were doing with our future force structure and were we buying the right things to meet the evolving capability gaps that we saw? And we weren’t.”
“Once I [was] able to sit down with folks in a classified environment and talk to them about what’s happened, while everybody acknowledges the decision was difficult and some may agree or not agree, they understand why we made the decision, and so I think that’s gone some way in buying back what some may perceive as a credibility crisis,” McCullough added.
McCullough added that the process the Navy undertook to make its decision was done right.
“First we conducted an in-depth evaluation [within] the Navy. Once we came to the conclusion that rendered the decision that the Navy made then we socialized this with OSD, because we want to have a solidified Navy position and then we wanted a solidified ‘big’ department-wide position. Once we received approval from OSD to go forward, that’s when we took it to Congress,” he explained. “That’s the right way to do it.”
It wasn’t approval of the plan, McCullough added, it was the approval to go to Congress with the Navy’s proposal. “That’s what we did. We think that’s the right way to do business.”
“From the outside, it looks like the timing was bad. The timing was hard and we realized that, but we wanted to make sure we had the decision right and then we wanted to make sure we briefed OSD on where we wanted to take the Navy and then go to Congress,” McCullough said. “As I look back on it, I really think we did it right, and it’s required some intense socialization with industry, with members of Congress that have an interest in it from an industrial base concern.
“Congress was generous in the ’09 appropriations, giving us $200 million in advanced procurement for DDG-51s to start that line up again in FY ’10, should that decision be approved by OSD,” he added.