The Marine Corps’ newest amphibious assault ships are designed to support expeditionary operations for at least the next 40 years, during which the technology inside their hulls will rapidly become obsolete.
Maj. Gen. Christopher Owens, the Marine Corps director of expeditionary warfare, said new warships must have open-architecture components and systems that can be repeatedly and rapidly upgraded to keep pace with threat technologies.
“When you think about it, a ship that is going to last 40 years has been designed well in advance, so the beginning of design is about half a century prior to when we intend to retire that ship,” Owens said recently at a forum on operations in the Pacific hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “We have to build in modernization, build in as much open architecture as we can to allow easy modernization of these ships.”
Senior Navy officials are on the same page and are establishing common baseline hardware and software architectures so that ship components can be readily upgraded.
Ship and weapon modernization is not a static, one-time process, Rear Adm. Jon Hill, program executive officer for Navy integrated warfare systems said in January. Maintaining an edge over adversaries and dominance of the sea will require nearly constant software upgrade between periodic hardware technological refresh, he said.
He and Owens said that the services must be ready for rapid developments in available technology that will maintain U.S. dominance and to rapidly counter emerging threat capabilities.
“There are things that come up, developments that we don’t anticipate,” Owens added. “So we continue to work on these ships and upgrade them, modernize them so that they will be relevant well into their later years.”
Topping the service’s ongoing modernization priorities are command, control, communication, computers and intelligence systems (C4I) and converging the Marines’ C4I systems with the Navy’s. Another key issue is expanding and enhancing the defensive capabilities of each ship. The Marine Corps wants the ability to upgrade or add weaponry to ships in anticipation of or response to enemy capabilities like anti-ship missiles.
“Over the last decade and a half, at times the Marines and the Navy kind of diverged in our C4I developments and requirements. The Marines have been land-focused in Iraq and Afghanistan and they have developed and procured a lot of gear that, it turns out, isn’t fully ship-compatible.
We’re now bringing the stakeholders together to make sure that what we develop is going to be compatible both at sea and ashore.”
The Marine Corps currently operates aboard 30 amphibious warships, which are operated by the Navy. Nine of those are big-deck flat-tops called landing helicopter docks, or LHDs, that have rotor- and fixed-wing aviation capability. The service has nine amphibious transport docks called LPDs and 12 dock landing ships, or LSDs, which are the smallest and oldest of the hull designs.
Owens said the 30-ship amphib fleet represented the “bottom” of a fleet-size curve that is now on the upswing. The Marine Corps now is focused on building new ships that incorporate proven weapons and platforms while ensuring that both the Navy and Marine Corps get the most effective and lengthy service lives as possible for the ships they do buy.
The Navy is set to receive the 10th and 11th LPDs this year and next.
LSDs are scheduled to retire beginning in the mid-2020s, Owens said. Their replacements, temporarily dubbed the LX(R)s, will be an entirely new class of ship that likely will resemble a scaled-down LPD, Owens said. The Navy will take delivery of the first of the class in 2025, before the decommissioning of the first LSD.
LX(R) is being built under a cost cap that will dictate the capabilities it ultimately will have. If the ship is under-budget, the Marine Corps intends to incorporate more of the capabilities of the San Antonio-class LPD.
“If we get above the cost cap, we have a prioritized list of things that we can cut out in order to meet that cap,” Owens said. “That sounds a little mercenary, but frankly in this fiscal climate those are the kinds of decisions we need to make and we know that the end result is going to be a very capable platform.”
New LHA amphibious ships are coming online that are optimized for operation of the F-35B and the MV-22 Osprey. The first, LHA-1 USS America was commissioned in late 2014. The second in the class, USS Tripoli, is scheduled to be delivered in late 2018. The Marine Corps in 2024 will receive LHA-8, which re-introduces the well deck that was removed from the previous two ships to meet the weight and balance requirements of the F-35 and its associated systems.
All of the Marine Corps’ existing big-deck amphibious ships are undergoing upgrades so they can operate with the F-35B, which is technically operational but has not been deployed aboard a ship. When LHA-6 left the shipyard, it immediately entered “final upgrades” to install the systems required to operate the F-35.
“We’re going to have to do additional modernization to these ships so that we can fully exploit the capabilities that the F-35B is going to bring to the fleet,” he said.