By Geoff Fein
The Navy’s next multi-year Virginia-class submarine contract, expected to be signed by the end of the year, will not only mark the beginning of building two subs per year in fiscal year ’11, it will also introduce changes to make the boats more common with the SSGN-class, while maintaining the teaming agreement between contractors, Navy official said.
Additionally, the Navy is already laying in the research and development plans for the follow on Block IV, Capt. Dave Johnson, Virginia-class program manager told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
The new eight ship contract, currently under negotiation, will continue the unique teaming arrangement between General Dynamics [GD] Electric Boat and Northrop Grumman [NOC] Shipbuilding, even though the Navy will move to building two ships a year under the contract, Johnson said.
“It was a very unique construct for anybody to build a ship, but we’ve now got it to where we have centers of excellence for building parts of the ship,” he said. “Teaming is the way we put forth for this next block we are buying…the next eight ships. Teaming is integral to that.”
Northrop Grumman builds the bows and sterns at Newport News, Va., The facility is on its sixth and seventh ones right now, Johnson said. GD’s Groton, Conn.-based Electric Boat has built the engine rooms, hull cylinders and the combat control module.
The teaming arrangement was mandated by congress, Johnson noted. However, he was unsure whether the arrangement would remain in the future buys.
“For Block III, [we] don’t know if there will be any language in this years authorization act that says it. To me it does not matter. Teaming is part of my acquisition strategy,” he said. “It would cost too much to break apart from that and relearn at Electric Boat to build the bows [and for] Northrop Grumman Newport News to build the engine rooms. We’ve gotten it down to where this is the way we want to keep building our Virginias.”
For the Block III buy, some changes were made to the design including changing the large tube and the sonar arrays, Johnson said.
At last month’s annual Navy League Sea Air and Space expo, Johnson described how the Navy took out the sonar sphere which was an air backed water tight system with a truck that ran all the way back to the enclosure on the submarine.
“We removed that and replaced that with a water-backed array,” he said. “We call it the Large Aperture Bow Array (LAB).”
The LAB Array, was developed for some time on congressional plus ups. Then at the right point, the Navy determined it was a technology that could really save them money and improve the submarine’s capability. So a decision was made to go invest in it, Johnson added. “That got inducted into the Virginia cost reduction program.”
Operators gave a thumbs up to the new system, so the Navy went ahead and put it into the design, he added.
“Once you…eliminated the sonar trunk, now you didn’t need that center-line hole there,” Johnson said.
That change enabled the Navy to neck down from 12 vertical launch tubes to two large diameter tubes, similar to what is on the SSGNs, he said..
“Going from 12 to two saves not only in the cost of the build, but it saves a lot in the cost to maintain,” Johnson said. “We had a strong pull from the people who maintain these ships that [they’d] rather maintain two large diameter tubes instead of 12 little ones, which is what later flight 688s and all the Virginias, through hull 10, will have. So it was a smart change.”
The change will enable Virginia-class subs beginning with hull 11 to carry the same payloads as the Ohio-class conversion SSGNs, Johnson said.
“We can use their payloads…the multiple all-up round canister (MAC). A MAC from a SSGN can come right out of that ship and go right into a Virginia,” he said. “So all the work they are doing with the SSGN…all the payload work…that is now applicable to your front line SSNs. You are going to have 20 Virginia-class submarines out there with these large tubes in them instead of just the four SSGNs.”
Additionally, some of the payloads the SSGN’s will carry for Special Operations Forces will now also be available for use on Virginia-class boats, Johnson added.
SSN-784, a FY ’09 ship, will be the first submarine to get the new tubes.
The Virginias will still have capability to shoot 12 tomahawk cruise missiles, he noted.
Looking ahead to potential modifications in the Block IV buy, Johnson said there could be plans to improve hull mounted sensors, for example.
“We are just now developing the plans, but the important thing is you need to be working in FY ’10, ’11 and ’12 in research and development so that you are ready to induct that, and price it into the contract in FY ’14,” he said. “We are already thinking about Block IV. In fact some of the things we wanted to do in Block III, that were not quite mature enough, we decided to target that for Block IV. So we have already put in a request with our sponsor for research and development funds.”
Those funds will be laid into the budget through the Program Objective Memorandum process to work on the Block IV research and development strategy, Johnson said.