Building “flexible” surface ships designed to accept incremental capability upgrades throughout their service lives is more expensive up front, but delivers superior mission performance than traditional ships designed for a specific mission profile, according to naval engineers.
“In all cases, the flexible warship gives you better growth and higher performance than a traditional warship,” Eric Rebentisch, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, said Feb. 15. “The effect of the ability to continually upgrade [mission capabilities] is pretty dramatic.”
Rebentisch oversaw a study of capability, survivability and cost over the service life of a traditional destroyer and one built with open architecture systems from the outset. The study fired 1,000 virtual shots at each ship with a mix of capabilities and developed a model over time of how each ship evolves.
“Turns out that is costs you a little bit more to build a flexible platform as opposed to a non-flexible platform,” Rebentisch said at the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE) conference outside Washington, D.C.
Building a ship with a foundational open-architecture that can accept periodic upgrades and enhancements over its lifecycle requires cash up front for non-recurring engineering and development costs.
“The numbers aren’t big, though,” he said. “The construction is a little bit more expensive because you have to put in an infrastructure that is flexible.”
Bryan McGrath, managing director of consultancy The FerryBridge Group and a former naval officer in command of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, called for the Navy to view its ships as trucks that carry around warfighting “commodities” that can be swapped out or grouped according to a perceived threat or mission.
“In this 2037 view of the world, surface ships will be most valued for flexibility, reconfigurability, interoperability and capacity,” McGrath said. “This is not what we prize in the way we currently build ships.”
Existing surface ships were “conceived of and built as a point solution to a set of requirements that produced a family of war-fighting capabilities,” McGrath said. Periodically they must be retrofitted with the latest technology and because the ships were not originally designed to accept such upgrades, they routinely are removed from service for 10-12 months.
“Insufficient thought was put into how it might evolve and how that evolution could be enabled,” he said. Surface ships of the future have to be built in order to pace the threat. When an Arleigh Burke destroyer is commissioned, it immediately begins to decline relative to the threat the moment it is commissioned. Ten years down the road, at least 10 years’ worth of technology and capability upgrades are then stuffed into that ship.”
“It then rejoins the fleet, again at a high state of readiness relative to the threat and begins the cycle of decline,” McGrath added. “Perhaps once again in its remaining service life it gets another expensive and extensive upgrade in which another $150 million gets poured into it.”
Designing flexible ships from the get go would allow for more frequent, less intrusive maintenance overhauls that are also less expensive and time consuming, McGrath said. He called for an open-architecture approach to ship design and capability procurement in which the Navy owns the technical interfaces and industry develops and pitches applications that plug into those interfaces.
“The ship is a truck that carries around commodities and those commodities are war-fighting capabilities…that can be swapped out pierside while the enabling software is upgraded over an encrypted network,” McGrath said.
“The government almost certainly wouldn’t get it right if it tried to impose such a system on industry,” he said. “Why not work together? Why not bring together the stakeholders together in this process and begin the work of creating the future?”