By B.C. Kessner
The Navy and industry together must keep striving to design open architecture systems in a way that will smooth out mid-life modernization expenses and decrease total ownership costs, the Chief of Naval Research said yesterday.
“We need to think of how we can design our ships in such a way they can affordably evolve to accomplish [emerging] missions,” Rear Adm. Nevin Carr said during the opening keynote address at Defense Daily‘s 3rd Annual Open Architecture Summit in Washington, D.C.
Part of the challenge stems from the fact that the government now pays for only about 30 percent of research and development (R&D) costs, with industry picking up nearly all of the remainder, Carr said. This is in contrast to what happened until about the 1960s, when government drove the train.
Consequently, industry R&D is directed more toward the end delivery phase of system development, where risk is lower and returns on investment higher, and directed much less toward basic new technology development than in the past, he added.
Open architecture and the potential for more open acquisition practices were the main themes discussed at the summit of government and industry systems and integration experts, and they could hold the answer for overcoming some of the challenges Carr raised.
“We need to think about separating the mission from the hull,” Carr said. “We do it on planes. You configure a plane for a mission by hanging ordnance under the wing, and it is sort of the same thought for ships.”
Carr said that’s where the Navy is going with the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). However, the Pentagon and industry are still prone to thinking today in terms of doing an analysis of alternatives (AoA) and producing a set of requirements that will help solve missions.
“And then we shrink wrap a ship around it,” he added.
Carr pointed to a ship called Sea Fighter that ONR designed and had built years ago. “It was really just a truck,” he said. The secret, besides a lot of very good integration, was that it had a very large open bay, into which containers and modular systems could be positioned and plugged in, he added.
“It was a predecessor to what LCS became, and LCS is certainly a very important step in this direction …but I would suggest that we need to go even further now,” Carr said.
The Navy should think in terms of building large empty ships and small empty ships in such a way that the missions could be packaged and modularized, he said. This provides flexibility in the short term and a way to flatten out the modernization fees in the middle of the total ownership cost curves, Carr added.