The Future for Naval Engineering -...

SPECIAL REPORT 306: NAVAL ENGINEERING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

THE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FOUNDATION FOR FUTURE NAVAL FLEETS

The Future for Naval Engineering

Millard S. Firebaugh

Paper prepared for the Committee on Naval Engineering in the 21st Century

Transportation Research Board

2011

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The Future for Naval Engineering

MILLARD S. FIREBAUGH

FOREWORD In the future for naval engineering, a broad integrating outlook on the part of naval engineering leadership is imperative for success. Success will be recognized in the form of a U.S. Navy that maintains naval dominance for the United States at costs that are regarded as reliable and reasonable in the context of the many other challenges the nation faces. The U.S. Navy must nurture leadership in naval engineering by paying close attention to the selection of the future leaders and exercising care in providing for their education and experience. Broad knowledge and consideration of future trends across all naval engineering elements will be critically important in creating naval systems that can serve effectively and efficiently for many years accommodating important changes in missions and in the technology of war-fighting systems during the long life of the undergirding hull, mechanical and electrical (HM&E). The U.S. Navy

• Is highly dependent on technology, • Faces much uncertainty as to the capabilities of the future threat, • Is entering a period of even more intense downward pressure on its budget, and • Must absorb new technologies from across the globe to maintain superiority.

In a 20-year look ahead naval engineering faces business, programmatic, and technological challenges. At its core, the navy exists to deploy military force from the sea in the interests of the United States of America. At its best, the navy does this far from its own shores. Mainly the navy carries out its mission in highly developed and specialized ships. The technologies concerning ships and the systems and equipment that operate in and from those ships are the province of naval engineering.

The navy’s ships spend long periods of time at sea. They must have global reach and persistence. They must be operable in the worst weather and survivable in the face of enemy attack. They must be designed for operation by young technically trained individuals. They must be in real time communication with other forces. They must be able to destroy hard targets at very long range. Their aim must be discriminating and precise. They must have the capacity to sense all of the militarily relevant aspects of their operating environment as well as go about routine business safely and securely. They must be able to be acquired and operated within budget constraints. They are expensive capital investments. They last 20–50 years and so must be capable of readily accommodating a great deal of change in the technology of many of their systems and components. They are powerful representatives of the United States of America.

Naval engineering encompasses naval architecture; marine engineering; ordnance engineering; electrical and electronics engineering; command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems; and battle management systems engineering; ship and ship system maintenance; and the industrial

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processes of design, engineering, manufacture, construction, and maintenance that deliver and sustain the hardware and software. Naval engineering is a composite of many engineering disciplines all realized in the context of naval systems. The work is difficult and requires tremendous breadth with profound knowledge to execute efficiently and effectively.

The best hedge against the uncertainties that will shape the technology of the future navy is to develop the best possible naval engineering leadership starting with high-quality accessions into the profession from graduates of rigorous and broad engineering education programs and continuing through specialized graduate education and challenging career assignments.

In this paper three themes are discussed. First and last, there is discussion concerning the importance of developing the individuals who are the future for naval engineering. Second, there is a discussion of key business, programmatic, and technological challenges that will be important in future naval engineering developments. Third, there is a section that discusses areas of knowledge that naval engineering leaders need to master, beyond the usual content of formal engineering education. These are posed as a series of questions.∗

As with most great enterprises, naval engineering for the U.S. Navy is fundamentally about people—their imagination, knowledge, skills, dedication, culture, work ethic, and vision for the future. It is a high privilege to have had the opportunity to serve in this stimulating, challenging profession and to come to know, enjoy, and engineer with respected colleagues. TASK The Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academy of Sciences has formed a committee to study naval engineering in the 21st century, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The committee’s charge is to evaluate the state of science and technology activities in naval engineering and related disciplines in the United States to identify opportunities to improve the capabilities of U.S. institutions to meet the needs of the U.S. Navy and opportunities to advance shipbuilding technology. As part of the study, the committee would like to ask experts and authorities in naval engineering and related fields to write commissioned papers on select themes and topics. The confluence on the one hand of new and unique naval needs and challenges in the foreseeable future, and rapid advances and development of basic science and novel technologies in traditional and new areas on the other, provides the need for a critical assessment of these challenges and potential opportunities. Papers are sought on research and technology challenges and potential game changing opportunities in naval engineering. The emphasis is on the future, looking over the horizon 15—50 years ahead.1

Committee members Al Tucker ([email protected]) and Dick Yue ([email protected]) have been assigned to work with this author in defining the topic and substance of the paper. This paper is being prepared with the benefit of the excellent draft papers by Paul Sullivan and Norbert Doerry, so it will not re-plow the ground they are already addressing except to add emphasis to drive home important points.

The invitation to prepare this paper asked that it address the topic of research and technology challenges and potential game-changing opportunities in naval engineering,

∗ One of the distinguished naval engineers, who I asked to review a draft of this paper, thought that having raised the questions I should attempt to answer them. I agree and that is a topic for future work. 1 This paragraph is a synopsis of several e-mails from Professor Dick Yue who initially contacted the author about this paper and Joseph Morris who is administering the study for TRB.

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emphasizing longer-term opportunities presented by new technologies. The author has chosen to broaden the scope of the challenges and opportunities. This paper takes the form of an essay expressing opinions about the future of naval engineering.

In the future for naval engineering a broad integrating outlook on the part of naval engineering leadership is imperative for success. Success will be recognized in the form of a U.S. Navy that maintains naval dominance for the United States at costs that are regarded as reliable and reasonable in the context of the many other challenges the nation faces. The U.S. Navy must nurture leadership in naval engineering by paying close attention to the selection of the future leaders and exercising care in providing for their education and experience. SCOPE OF NAVAL ENGINEERING This paper will take a broad view of the topic of naval engineering, addressing applications of technology in naval systems. As commonly used in the U.S. Navy, the term naval engineering applies mainly to the engineering associated with naval ships including the integration of weapons, combat systems, and communications systems and special considerations such as those concerning weapons effects and detectability. Naval engineering has tended to start and end with the ship as the central focus of what is regarded as the discipline of naval engineering. Weapon engineering, the engineering of sensor systems, the engineering of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems, including battle management systems and the engineering of naval aircraft are understood to be allied fields closely associated with naval engineering. But, organizationally, programmatically and in terms of the education and experience of the practitioners naval engineering has been the discipline of the hull, mechanical and electrical (HM&E) practitioners integrating the products of other disciplines into the ship engineering process. Experience suggests that weapons, sensors, C4I SR and battle management systems, ship borne naval aircraft and ships must be considered as integral parts of a whole to properly engineer each entity to work effectively and efficiently in its naval context. Accordingly in this paper on naval engineering includes the engineering of naval ships, weapons and associated sensor and electronic systems, and to some extent the special ship engineering needs of naval aircraft. This somewhat broader definition supports the idea that naval engineering is a broadly based discipline. Naval engineering should emphasize the effective, efficient combination (integration, to use the current word) of many technologies each with its own specialized practitioners into a smoothly functioning, cost efficient, engineered construct that will serve needs and meet requirements for many years.

The TRIDENT system of strategic submarines and missiles is an example of naval engineering at its finest. That system is based on technologies originally developed in the late 60s and early 70s. The lead ship was commissioned in 1981 carrying the TRIDENT I (C-4) missile. Eventually all of the ships carried the TRIDENT II (D-5) missile. A follow-on ship, designated SSBNX, is now planned to enter service in about 2029. At a nominal construction rate of one ship per year for a 12-ship program, each replacing one or more TRIDENT submarines as the new ships enter service, the original 70s ship design and the very long range, highly accurate, multiple warhead D-5 missile will serve until 2040—60 years. The program involves a very broad array of engineering skills in accomplishing this piece of naval engineering.


The nuclear powered aircraft carrier is another example of a highly engineered system accommodating many different war-fighting capabilities in the form of the varieties of aircraft that can be accommodated in what is an inherently modular concept2. Like TRIDENT these splendid examples of naval engineering serve the nation for decades.

In the SEAWOLF submarine program, in retrospect, there was a naval engineering opportunity that was missed due to a lack of broad based command of the full range of engineering practice potentially contributing to the desired capability. SEAWOLF was designed with larger diameter torpedo tubes than was past practice for the purpose of accommodating a not-yet-developed quiet weapon. These large diameter tubes made the ship significantly larger than it would otherwise have needed to be and contributed to other complications in the choice of related materials and components. At the time that these decisions were being made highly experienced naval engineers with broader knowledge could have probed to determine if there were other approaches to achieving a quiet weapon that would not have required larger diameter tubes. For example, could more energetic materials have been developed for the weapon warhead and fuel, freeing volume in the conventional weapon envelop for quieting features. The author, who was deeply involved in SEAWOLF, cannot recall any trade-offs or analysis being conducted in search of a less costly approach for a quiet weapon.3 The research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) program that supported SEAWOLF was comprehensive in the areas of submarine HM&E; in the technology of sonar arrays; and in the reactor plant. The SEAWOLF developments in many areas were extended into the VIRGINIA Class very successfully, but for cost reasons VIRGINIA returned to smaller diameter torpedo tubes and there is still no very quiet weapon to complement these very quiet submarines. A more thorough job of naval engineering would not have left that task un-addressed.

Later in this paper the importance of configuring ships for ease of manufacture and assembly and to facilitate modernization during their service life will be emphasized. Concepts under the general heading of modularity will be promoted. The author contends that broad knowledge and consideration of future trends across all naval engineering elements will be critically important in creating naval systems that can serve effectively and efficiently for many years accommodating important changes in missions and in the technology of war-fighting systems during the long life of the undergirding HM&E. PREPARATION FOR THE FAR FUTURE Looking over the horizon 15–20 years is a daunting task given

• A broad definition of naval engineering, • The rapid advance of technology on a global basis,

2 The author is indebted to Mr. William Schmitt for this observation. Mr. Schmitt recently retired from Naval Reactors after many years service as the CVN program manager. 3 The author was the SEAWOLF program manager from inception of the program in the mid 1980s through contract awards for construction of the first two ships. The notion of a trade-off in the weapon design by developing new energetics, freeing volume for quieting, did not occur to the author until his current relationship with the University of Maryland Center for Energetic Concepts Development. The point is that the practice of naval engineering at the highest level is best done by individuals with broad technical experience.

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• The diversity of global politics and the uncertainties as to what will be the future threats that the navy must meet,

• The uncertainties of domestic politics, and • The priority of defense spending in the face of the fiscal challenges the nation faces.

On the other hand, experience shows that technologies already in the minds of today’s innovators will form the substance of what is new in the systems the navy will field 20 years hence. For example, as mentioned above, the VIRGINIA Class uses much of the technology developed originally for SEAWOLF. But, before exploring technologies that the author believes will be important in new generations of naval systems it is important to comment on the best possible basis for guiding development, assessing and choosing among those technologies when the decisions must be made.

The future for naval engineering will be best addressed by the U.S. Navy nurturing a community of highly educated and experienced practitioners in which special effort has been invested in developing the full range of skills that will be needed. In the author’s experience, that community works best when it includes a proper balance of U.S. Navy uniformed naval engineering experts [engineering duty officers (EDO)]; civilian Department of the Navy (DoN) scientists and engineers; selected officers of the unrestricted line who combine intensive operational experience with technical education and assignments; and industry experts in design, engineering, manufacturing, and maintenance of the many involved technologies. Later in this paper details will be addressed concerning the kinds of expertise that must be cultivated for the United States to continue its naval dominance and suggestions offered for practices to nurture that expertise.

In the author’s experience, some elements of the skills, knowledge, and technology needed to address our uncertain future such as our capabilities in naval nuclear propulsion are well developed and appear to be dependable for the foreseeable future. Other important fields are only dimly appreciated for their potential because these areas are underdeveloped in our present construct, such as the area of energetic materials. The paper will comment on these underserved elements in the next section.

Naval engineering is accretive in the sense that really new technologies of importance in naval engineering are invented, reduced to practice, and become necessary to enable new capabilities for the navy, but because ships last a long time older technologies don’t seem to retire at the same rate that new technologies emerge. For example, in the area of weapons, guns are still a valued part of the arsenal, but missiles of many types have emerged and become the central technology for naval ordnance. And now, high-energy electric weapons are in early stages of development headed toward application.4 Naval engineers need to be skilled in husbanding these longstanding mature technologies as well as in the adaptation and integration of the new technologies. The future naval engineer will have the task of developing the kind of profound expertise necessary to integrate the new with the tried and true, all subject to the

4 Arguments have been made by some in ONR that electric weapons will soon supplant ordnance based on energetics. This assertion has been advanced in support of the all-electric ship, which would then not have to carry conventional ordnance in protected magazines. The rail gun would launch kinetic rounds that would be cheap and could be stored in dense packing in holds more like cargo holds simplifying the ship and making it less vulnerable to damage from enemy ordnance. But, the author is unaware of any comprehensive, detailed analysis that addresses how this would work for all of the targets that U.S. Navy ships can now hold at risk allowing the elimination of all energetic materials from our ships.


rigorous demands of the constrained geometry of a ship, operating for extended periods in a challenging natural environment, as well as delivering naval power in harm’s way. Naval ships are an enormous investment. They are engineered for a long service life during which the technology of naval warfare continues to advance, especially the technology of C4ISR. Even more than accommodating a rich mixture of current technologies, the most effective naval engineering products allow for continuing improvement through the life not only of an individual ship, but also through the life of the class design. The leading naval engineers need exceptional education, experience, vision, and foresight to perform well in this highly challenging profession.

The recently concluded 2010 study by the Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) noted that the long period since the end of World War II in which the United States has been technologically dominant in the world is drawing to a close. Much of today’s innovation and technology comes from abroad, as for example in consumer electronics and information technology. The NRAC advised that the U.S. Navy should plan on a much more aggressive policy for understanding and exploiting foreign technology. This is yet another challenge for the naval engineering leadership. Indeed, it came to light in a 2009 study of the shipbuilding culture of quality in which this author participated, that our leading naval engineers are so busy tending to the many matters that press on them every day in the programs in which they are presently involved, that they have little time to even learn best practices across the major naval engineering efforts in our own navy. Given that the U.S. Navy

• Is highly dependent on technology, • Faces much uncertainty as to the capabilities of the future threat, • Is entering a period of even more intense downward pressure on its budget, and • Must absorb new technologies from across the globe to maintain superiority,

Should it not put in place a plan to develop the best possible naval engineering leadership starting with high quality accessions into the profession? Such a plan would emphasize selecting the best and brightest individuals in technical curricula from the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA), the Naval Reserves Officers Training Corps (NROTC), and other officer accession programs as well as in hiring civilian scientists and engineers for the DoN technical staff. After selection and initial assignments, post-graduate education would be required in curricula selected for their naval engineering content. The DoN naval engineering leadership would include in their responsibilities evaluation and coaching for the academic programs developing naval engineers. Their guidance would include a look ahead to put in place capabilities that will be important as new technologies take their place in naval engineering.5

5It may be argued that ongoing measures are similar to what is recommended. There are EDOs, graduate education programs, and encouragement for the DoN civilian naval engineers to pursue graduate education. The ED option program allows midshipmen to select engineering duty as an option for transfer from the unrestricted line to ED after service at sea. But, the once robust naval engineering graduate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is much reduced in numbers. Naval engineers in related disciplines such as ordnance engineering come from programs with less content offered by the Naval Post-Graduate School with a few officers obtaining advanced degrees from other universities. The ED community is seriously under strength, in an ever more technological navy. The development of the civilian staff is ad hoc, a matter worked out at each naval engineering activity in a diffuse process. The required Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA) training focuses on acquisition

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NAVAL ENGINEERING CHALLENGES IN A 20-YEAR LOOK AHEAD Business Challenges Living with a Budget That is Losing Buying Power

Since the late 80s the fleet has shrunk from the famous 600 ships promoted by then Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, to today’s count of 286, including combat logistic ships.6 Today’s ships are more capable than they have ever been, to be sure. Generally, they have more capable sensors, carry more armament, with far longer reach and effect, and operate more intensively. They are certainly more expensive to acquire.7 And despite intensive head scratching and various programmatic adventures, the problem of how to get more ships with dollars that don’t seem to stretch far enough has not yet been solved. Even the somewhat more sophisticated question of how to get more capability within the budget constraints does not produce satisfying answers.8

At present, the navy is having an especially difficult time setting a course for future surface combatants. After many years of programmatic confusion, during which several attempts were made to acquire a new highly capable class of ships that could satisfy needs for a DDG 51 Class follow-on, the navy settled for a re-start of DDG 51 production, rather than develop the new, sure-to-be-very-expensive, CGX. This decision was taken on the basis that the DDG-51 hull could, through technological advances and modifications, eventually incorporate a large enough radar to serve the new mission of ballistic missile defense. The DDG 1000 program will produce three ships (smart money says only two.) Meanwhile the search for lower costs and increased ship numbers has led to the LCS (littoral combat ship) program. That program was sold on the basis of ships that would cost about $220 million each. The current estimate is about $600 million and the story isn’t over.9 One might suppose that frustration with the high cost of shipbuilding led to a loss of confidence by the senior leadership of the navy in the naval engineers. Seeking palliatives, the senior non-engineering leadership was prey to unrealistic claims and ideas for a fix, including entrusting the program to individuals with limited experience in ship acquisition and little naval engineering education and experience. The program now struggles with both technical issues and programmatic issues. But, on the bright side, LCS offers a step forward in that the program specifies that the ships will host mission packages that will bring a range of modular, tailored combat capabilities to the ship. This has the effect of allowing for changing the combat capability of the ship easily and quickly without

management processes rather than engineering. The present plan, such as it is, lacks a sense of priority and coherency based on a profound commitment to naval engineering excellence. 6 In an article in the September 2010 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol 136/9/1,291 titled Mind the Gap by Mackenzie Eaglen, p. 19, Eaglen states, “Today’s Navy has fewer Sailors than at any period since 1941 and the smallest Fleet since 1916.” 7 The Congressional Research Service analyst Ron O’Rourke writes extensively on matters related to naval force structure and budgets. The author recommends reading his current reports for detailed analysis of the navy acquisition decisions on which the congress will have to act. 8 Because they are easy to count, ships are used by the public and by the national leadership as a basic metric for the capability of the U.S. Navy. But, at a finer level of detail, clearly as a low capability ship like an FFG 7 class ship goes out of commission and is replaced by a more capable ship like a DDG 51 Class, the capability of the navy has improved. Measuring the capability using metrics like number of missile launch tubes, electrical generating capacity, aircraft spots, etc., generally shows less erosion of capability than just looking at the ship count. 9Ronald O’Rourke, Specialist in Naval Analysis, Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Program: Background, Issues and Options for Congress, June 10, 2010.


having to make changes to the ship HM&E. Assuming that this concept will be implemented satisfactorily, it is intended to support a variety of missions from a common hull and thus reduce the costs of staying modern through the 25-year projected service life of the ships.

In a recent speech Secretary of Defense Robert Gates commented, that the U.S. Navy was larger than the sum of the next 13 navies in the world most of whom are U.S. allies. His remarks, of course, have occasioned a great deal of discussion in naval circles. But, no one can miss the signal that there are tough budget times ahead. Experienced programmers in the Pentagon will observe that in this environment a dollar saved in shipbuilding may be spent elsewhere. That might be a good idea for somebody but not for shipbuilders. The point is that in the future for naval engineering and the search for a larger, more capable fleet, thought needs to be given incentives other than, “Thank you, very much for your contribution to solving other problems.” Somehow navy leadership must convey a message to naval engineers and shipbuilders that there is a firm enough market for larger numbers of ships for which costs are predictable and contained to stimulate shipbuilders to invest heavily in the most modern facilities and processes. High-Cost Shipbuilding Business Base with Excess Physical Capacity The naval shipbuilding industrial base is slowly re-sizing to match demand. At present, there is considerable excess capacity.

In mid-July 2010 Northrop Grumman announced that they were planning on closing their Avondale facility in New Orleans after completing the two LPD 17 Class ships that are being completed in that shipyard. In that same news release, Northrop Grumman disclosed that they were considering exiting the shipbuilding business altogether by selling their remaining two shipyards in Newport News, Virginia, and Pascagoula, Mississippi.

The General Dynamics shipyards seem to have a fairly robust future business portfolio with VIRGINIA Class construction and SSBNX design at Electric Boat, as well as the DDG51 re-start and the DDG-1000 class at Bath Iron Works. Prospects at NASSCO are problematic although there are ideas that look promising for work beyond NASSCO’s very successful T-AKE program.

The five large and two small shipyards that will remain after Avondale closes are certainly adequate to build the navy’s large combatants, combat logistics ships, and the LCS small combatants in as large numbers as anyone would suggest are even conceivable for the future. A good case can be made that the nation is well past the point at which any meaningful business competition can be sustained among its remaining major naval shipbuilders. Clearly, only NNS can build nuclear powered aircraft carriers. Pascagoula has been the only builder of large amphibs for a very long time. With the closure of Avondale it appears that all amphibs will now come from Pascagoula. The DDG 51’s have been split between Pascagoula and Bath Iron Works in a quasi-competition, but it can certainly be argued that the loss of economic order quantities and learning as well as hidden costs is not compensated for by competitive pressure. In the case of the VIRGINIA Class construction in which Electric Boat is the prime for the acquisition and the other submarine shipbuilder, Newport News, is a sub-contractor to the prime there is essentially no competition but two builders. While as a matter of political necessity the navy and the shipbuilders have done their best to optimize the VIRGINIA Class construction process, there is clearly a surcharge for maintaining both builders in the program. Of course, the politics and the law favor the notion of competition even if is ineffective and may be adding costs to ship acquisition.

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In a move that many questioned, the navy chose to award the LCS program to two smaller, so-called second-tier shipyards. One of these, the Austal yard in Mobile, Alabama, is essentially a brand new shipyard. Austal is now competing for the follow-on LCSs and has contracts for the Joint High-Speed Support Vessel (JHSV). The other LCS yard is the Marinette Marine facility in northern Wisconsin, which has been bought by the Italian company Fincantieri. Fincantieri has promised to modernize the facility if they win the competition.

The LCS program started with great fanfare to introduce competition from small builders into the acquisition of combatants. The program was structured for two builders to build two different kinds of LCSs, sustaining a competition. The first attempt at reaping the benefits of that competition went awry because the bids were higher than the navy could afford. A competition was then held to down-select to a single design. It was planned to then compete this single design among all of the builders. But, the results of the competition led to bids with options for 10 ships that were very close to each other in bid cost and affordable within the navy’s budget. In a bold move the navy convinced Congress that both bids should be accepted, achieving contractual commitments for 20 ships. This dual award has the great virtue of avoiding a protest in a competition that, if lost, could very well have been terminal for one of the competing builders. The acquisition plan now results in a 20 ships on order of two different designs—so far so good for the benefit of competition for the LCS.

One of the LCS designs has inadequate weight margin. The lead ship of that design was delivered with virtually no growth margin contrary to long established Navy margin policy. That design also missed the opportunity to execute a design–build strategy with a shipbuilder facilitized to employ the most modern construction processes with a ship design that can take full advantage of those processes. A proper design–build-based re-design could restore needed weight margin and further reduce the costs of constructing these ships.

The significance of the shipbuilding business base to the future of naval engineering lies in the matter of design–build. The future naval engineer should understand not only the technology of the product but also the technology of the industrial and business processes that will make the product so that the design not only achieves the desired functionality but also can be built in the most efficient way.

For the future the navy ought to consider eliminating the pretense of competition, find other business incentives such as aggressive share lines to motivate contractor efficiency and concentrate on design–build with product line programs in aligned shipbuilding companies for its major ship acquisitions. Of course, the competitive process gets a big boost from the current success of the LCS strategy. But, a case can be made that these circumstances are unique to that type of small ship and not applicable to major combatants. Low-Rate Production In the acquisition lexicon of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, there is an acquisition phase for a program usually in the initial phase of production called low-rate production, as opposed to full-rate production. This phrase makes sense in the procurement of items in which eventual production will number in the hundreds or thousands of units. But in the case of shipbuilding, low rate is as high a rate as will ever happen. As a practical matter for many reasons, no two ships are ever identical. Component suppliers come and go. The fleet’s needs change. As ships operate, deficiencies emerge that need to be fixed in future ships of the class. New technologies emerge that either reduce costs in acquisition, or in maintenance, or create new desirable


capabilities if included in the class design. Because ships take years to build, change is inevitable. The fewer ships being bought the greater the pressures for change, because the opportunities to fix issues or introduce new capabilities are few and each unit is so important.

As Paul Sullivan points out in his paper, major and avoidable sources of change in most shipbuilding programs are changes in the early ships of a class induced by starting construction while still in the early stages of design. The simple sounding idea of completing the bulk of the design work before starting construction seems hard to execute in practice. The design details cannot be completed until the equipment is chosen. Usually equipment selection can’t be pinned down until the ship construction funds are available to purchase the equipment. The selection of developmental equipment not only requires funds to purchase the equipment, but the completion of the development. All of this takes time and patience by the fleet customer, the DoN leadership and Congress. There may be business realities that drive the start of construction such as avoiding a production gap that would imperil the integrity of a trained construction labor force. There may be operational requirements to field the new ship by a certain point in time. Concurrence in design and construction becomes attractive in the face of all of the schedule pressures. And, stretched-out schedules bring there own costs in the form of a longer period of paying the overhead. Analysis of current programs should be undertaken by very experienced naval engineers to develop templates for future ship programs based on an ideal design–build process and schedule for the acquisition of the first several ships of the class. Then these templates should guide the acquisition plan for future ship classes including the basis on which RDT&E and SCN funding is sequenced.

The wise naval engineer will design to accommodate change. Designs must anticipate the kinds of changes that are likely and accommodate them by various strategies. In the case of software, the buzz phrases are “open architecture” and “plug ‘n play.” These concepts have many precedents in naval engineering. For example, the submarine can stow and launch several different weapons from the same torpedo room and tubes, a kind of mechanical open architecture. The aircraft carrier can host many different kinds of aircraft in different combinations, another example of an open architecture. The LCS is very specifically designed to host mission packages that can be quickly changed as need be to address different missions for the ship. But, the future naval engineer needs to apply a much more aggressive approach to open architecture than has been the practice in the profession. Open architecture needs to be seen as applicable to much more than just electronics.10

Program plans need to avoid the needless change of too much concurrency in development, design, and construction and facilitate through open architecture the necessary changes brought about by changing needs, the advent of new highly desirable technology, and other facts of life situations.11 In addition, prior to committing a radically new technology in the major HM&E area to a new flight of major ships, sufficient time and expense must be invested in large-scale testing and evaluation of the total system encompassing this technology.

10 The MK 41 Vertical Launcher in surface combatants is an example of an open architecture weapon launcher. It was developed in the early 1980s in an early version of the LCS concept. Jack Abbott, who was design manager for that early system, continues to apply his insights in the current LCS program. 11 The very successful Acoustic Rapid COTS Insertion (ARCI) program applied to the VIRGINIA Class submarines and a plan for standard cabinet interfaces and a equipment installation and removal process for combat system electronics in the CVN-78 are examples of accommodating needed change in design.

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Fragile Vendor Base

Because shipbuilding production rates are low, the supplier base for components is small and shrinking. Both Paul Sullivan and Norbert Doerry in their papers discuss the urgent need for common components especially in the HM&E systems where the small specialized vendor base is small and getting smaller. In Doerry’s paper he discusses the virtues of a product line as a basis for programs. To understand the need for commonality and the virtues of a product line basis for building the fleet’s systems as opposed to a ship program by ship program basis a little history is useful.

In the 1980s computer technology, already changing at a rapid rate, really took off. The navy, worrying about the rapid pace of change in computer technology and the adverse effects of change in contracts for ships and equipment to accommodate the latest and greatest computers, made a heroic effort to standardize computers. Very experienced individuals insisted on using only standard computers. Of course, the standard computers such as the AN/UYK 7 and the more advanced AN/UYK 43 and 44 were becoming obsolete almost as they were being designed. It soon became apparent that a sailor could go to an electronics store and purchase a small computer for his own use that had more processing power than the vaunted new combat system installed in his new ship. Proprietary business interests both for the standardized computers with highly specialized coding in system specific military instantiations and for the new-think open architectures using commercially available non-MIL-SPEC hardware and software contended for the navy’s systems acquisition money. By the early 1990s in a process of acquisition reform MIL-SPEC computers were out and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) were in. but, in a massive case of misunderstanding the respective technologies all MIL-SPEC hardware including typical HM&E items—pumps, valves, air-conditioning plants—became non grata by dictate from the defense policy makers. Commercial was in, MIL-SPEC out, across the board.12 With COTS comes variety and with that comes higher costs and complexity in logistic support.

Generally, HM&E equipment and systems for naval ships require the imposition of two kinds of specialized requirements over and above that relating to the underlying functional performance. First, the equipment must be fit to operate in a marine environment. Marine environments typically expose equipment to the corrosive effects of seawater, ship motions, and a special need for reliability for equipment operating far from technical assistance for repair. This applies similarly to military and commercial marine equipment. Second, the equipment must be made fit to operate in a military environment. Military environments create special needs for the equipment to be rugged to survive destructive forces that could be encountered in combat, to be especially quiet or have other stealth features, to be operable in very adverse circumstances, and to be compact. In some applications it is also important that the quality of the equipment be especially validated, such as for submarine service, along with being designed for very high pressures. The navy’s MIL-SPECs were the traditional vehicle for imposing these requirements. Un-like the computer technology typical HM&E equipment changes more slowly. The specs were a means of also imposing a level of commonality. But, they often still allowed components by different manufacturers to have different configurations that were spec compliant. The specs should be revitalized and used as a basis for standardizing components and

12 In fairness to the political leadership in OSD at the time, the navy had allowed the funding for a very modest program of maintaining the currency of the MIL-SPECs to atrophy. As a result is was easy to pick up a spec and find something to pick at, further discrediting the role of the MIL-SPECs in acquisition.


configurations for selected components and sub-systems across the range of naval-engineered systems where it is sensible to do so and in which the rate of important technological change is more decadal than annual. The pay-offs can be large in terms of reduced costs of acquisition and maintenance for the fleet.13 Success in such an effort requires very well-educated government naval engineers who are discerning about the technology so as to facilitate very beneficial technological advances and who can form cooperative relationships with industry partners. The mechanism to facilitate the logistic benefits of commonality in the piece part set for the navy’s ships is through the navy’s specifications in a process administered by enlightened naval engineers and simplified through a product line approach to ship acquisition.14

Programmatic Challenges

Expectation and Technology Push for Ever-Higher Performance

The technology keeps advancing. Even very mature technologies such as the internal combustion engine continue to advance in important ways. Each opportunity has to be evaluated on the basis of a number of criteria. This is an area in which the education of the naval engineers is particularly important. Naval engineers need to be confident and open-minded but intensively analytical in evaluating technological opportunities. A broad but deep post-graduate education is very important preparation for quality decisions in the matter of introducing new technology into the navy. Norbert Doerry’s paper provides a detailed critique of the process of incorporating new technology.

Programs and Product Lines

Norbert Doerry’s paper discusses the advantages of programs based on product lines. The present structure of somewhat independent programs with Program Executive Officers (PEOs) relating to the Systems Command for certain kinds of technical, business, and contracting support is a barrier to commonality, shared lessons learned, and the ability to apply the talents of the most capable naval engineers across the entire enterprise. This balkanization of naval engineering among programs and the SYSCOM proliferates inexperienced staffs all so busy feeding the system of top-down checks that there is little time or reward for mining best practices and expanding knowledge of advancing technology. The present structure is supposed to clarify responsibility and accountability and it may do that, but it doesn’t get the most leverage out of

13 Numerous studies have shown that commonality in the kinds of components that tend to last through the life of a ship can save a lot of money in the numbers of repair parts that must be stocked, in training for operation and maintenance, and in the purchasing power of economic order quantities. The problem is that some investment is required in maintaining the specs and the pay-off is long term because the policies that have facilitated variety over commonality have created a legacy that must be supported for the life of ships just now entering the fleet. Standardization on a common set of components can be done in ways that facilitate competition with component vendors competing on the basis of a validated specification, but the criticism is leveled that the navy must then stand accountable in the ship acquisition for the specification. Of course, the navy will be accountable anyway for the life of the ship. 14 The VIRGINIA Class submarine program employed a very stringent proves during detail design to limit the variety of parts selected by the designers. A common parts catalog was developed covering the range of parts likely to be needed. Should an individual designer require a part not in the catalog, a rigorous justification was required and subject to review by the then–electric boat program manager, Fred Harris. That process got high marks for curtailing needless variety in the piece part set required to produce the ship.

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the knowledge and experience of the best naval engineers. The PEO organizational structure as it relates to the Naval Sea Systems Command and building ships for the navy generates unneeded overhead, creates excessively complex processes for design and development, and strains the resource base of competent practitioners. In short, it adds unnecessary cost. A simplified approach of product line managers operating within the expertise of NAVSEA using generally common, but product line tailored, processes, directly linked to their shipbuilders for new ships and to the fleet maintainers for the operating forces, should be tried.

Hard-to-Predict Emerging Requirements

The future warfighting requirements for the fleet are hard to predict, so design in flexibility such as envisioned in the LCS program is a must. The basic idea of treating the ship, as realized in the HM&E, as a truck that can bring many different cargos in the form of sensors, combat systems, communications, and weapons to the fray should be viewed as the key future design paradigm. The navy is moving slowly in that direction. For example, the utility of large diameter missile tubes in the TRIDENT program will now be realized in the attack submarine program. A modification to the VIRGINIA Class design will install two large TRIDENT diameter tubes in place of the present 12 vertical launch missile tubes. These large-diameter tubes can accommodate 6 missiles each or other systems such as a large unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV). Other examples have been cited earlier in this paper, such as the CVN 78 electronics systems interface.

A naval ship design is an exercise in multivariable optimization. The designer has in mind some mission, typically multifaceted, some performance parameters like speed, and the all important cost variables—acquisition and maintenance. The process of trade-offs and analysis of alternatives can easily drive short term thinking and a kind of false precision into the early stage design process causing the design to be optimized for a very specific capability rather than for more general utility. This is another area in which judgment is critically important. The best hedge against a vague future has to be a ship that is designed to adapt easily to a wide range of missions and capabilities. To realize this important objective, sufficient margins for design, construction, and subsequent life growth in the vessel’s weight, stability, and electric power consumption should be specified and rigorously maintained throughout the implementation process.

Educating Frustrated Leadership, Prey to Un-Informed Palliatives

Our system selects leaders for the highest positions of authority in the navy who may not have much experience in naval engineering and the acquisition of naval systems. These individuals are usually broadly competent leaders with a range of skills with which to guide the navy. But, the naval engineers don’t make it easy for them to make the right decisions. Professionally, naval engineers have not done a very good job of explaining ourselves. Naval engineers do not offer operational and political leadership much in the way of thoughtful plain language analysis of what has worked and what hasn’t and why. In fact, as stated earlier, naval engineers don’t have a very good process for sharing lessons learned among the naval engineers. It could only help to


have a readable history of the profession and its ups and downs over the last many years.15 The history should include case studies of both successful and unsuccessful programs. In the meantime, the accomplished naval engineers need to step up and make their case when the ship of state is standing into shoal water.

Diminishing Tolerance for Error in Operation

Generally the U.S. Navy, and to a large extent American society in general, has high expectations for its technology. In the U.S. Navy, a lot of credit for high standards should go to naval reactors, naval aviation, and the Strategic Systems Program. The nuclear submarine programs and the nuclear aircraft carrier programs have shown the benefit of very high standards. In the specific case of nuclear-powered ships, the consequences of a nuclear accident would be to put at risk the striking power of the navy. So, as a matter of national importance, the nuclear-powered propulsion systems must be robustly engineered to resist failure and maintain consistently reliable operation. But, very high standards for technical performance convey many benefits. Systems that are very carefully designed and maintained are usually easier and safer to operate. Although high quality may cost more on the front end of the program, it generally pays big dividends in reducing the total cost of ownership.

The marinized gas turbine, replacing decades of high-pressure steam propulsion systems, should get a lot of credit for improving the reliability and operability of the navy’s surface ships. Sensors and the extraction of information from the sensor outputs through computation have been very important in developing the extended range combat capability of today. Energetics, which provide weapons’ propulsion and destructive power, benefited from a long-term significant investment in the technology of insensitive munitions that are safe to store and handle. And, there are many other technologies that contribute to a high standard for operability in the navy.

Much more automation of systems and sensing of shipboard systems performance lie in the future. The naval engineer of the future will need to be proficient in the technologies of sensing both the external environment for conducting the fight and the internal environment for maintaining the ship’s performance.

Precision in design, engineering analysis, manufacturing processes, quality, and supportability are already very important in the acquisition of naval engineered systems. But, to borrow a metaphor from the world of 6 sigma we are probably at about 2 sigma and we have a long way to go. High-quality people are required to execute high-quality programs.

15 The American Society of Naval Engineers has produced two editions of Naval Engineering and American Sea Power, the first edition in 1988 and the second in 2000. Copies are available from the American Society of Naval Engineers. This author is proud to have been the editor of the second edition, although most of the work was done by the managing editor, Sally Skolnick. Rear Admiral Randy King, USN (ret), edited the first edition. Being involved with this book was an eye opener as to how hard it is to produce a good history that can dig out the truth about a complex subject and present it in a readable, informative manner. Naval Engineering and American Sea Power can be a useful reference for some topics but it covers the entire U.S. naval engineering history in some 600 pages written by 19 different contributors. What is needed is a book dealing with post-World War II connecting DoN and OSD policy and processes with naval engineering processes and products, dealing with the technical, programmatic, and business matters. The needed book would become a trove of experience and lessons learned and a guide to improving performance as well as education for the non-naval engineering leadership.

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Attracting and Keeping the Best and Brightest for the Profession

Earlier in this paper there was a discussion of the importance of attracting and nurturing the best and brightest for the naval engineering profession. A lot of money will be spent on the basis of decisions, good and bad, made by naval engineers. Their decisions have great consequences in the selection of the technology that those who operate our navy ships and equipment must make work as the navy goes about the business of deterring and defeating adversaries.

Naval engineers will not be lured to our ranks by high remuneration either in the government service or in the industry. But, they will come for the intellectual challenge along with respectable pay and the excitement of creating extraordinary technology. A major motivator can be the opportunity to acquire a high-end technical education with the prospect of knowing that that education will be put directly to work. The navy has experience and tradition in directing content in post-graduate education. For example, in the now 110-year education program conducted for the navy by MIT, the navy has supplied one or two senior engineering duty officers to MIT to serve as professors. These individuals teach naval design courses enhancing the MIT curricula. They also monitor and advise the naval officer students the MIT faculty with respect to the content and scope of subject offerings. The input of officer students to the MIT program has fallen to the point of barely being viable. That program needs to be restored to the vigor it once had with annual inputs to the three-year program of about 15 officers per year. Additionally, the navy could institute similar programs at other quality technical institutions with historically strong academic and research programs in technical areas vital to the future of naval engineering such as the Webb Institute, the University of Michigan, or the University of California.

At the U.S. Naval Post-Graduate School the academic program is controlled by the navy directly. The navy knows how to do this but emphasis on the quality of the naval officer students and the quality of the education programs is needed. To realize full value, high priority must be given to creating and sustaining a highly qualified naval engineering staff.

Similar education opportunities to participate in full-time, deep-immersion, advanced education in technical curricula need to be extended to selected high performers among the ranks of the civilian naval engineers. And, the navy could establish a professor chair in naval engineering and support several undergraduate students for 4 years at Webb Institute in exchange for a several year commitment to work at the Naval Sea Systems Command or some other DoN naval engineering installation. Civilian scientists and engineers throughout the navy’s technology workforce should be incentivized to pursue graduate education. In the author’s experience at the University of Maryland, College Park, outstanding opportunities exist for tailored programs to infuse new knowledge into the navy’s professional technical workforce. Similar opportunities are doubtless available in every part of the nation relevant to navy technical work.

There is a particular need to attract and retain individuals with advanced degrees in electrical engineering. In every area of marine engineering, sensors, combat systems, weapons engineering, and naval communications electrical engineering skills are a necessity. The navy needs to undertake a very specific effort to produce greater numbers of naval electrical engineers because of the fact that at every turn the navy is more and more dependent on electrical and


electronic systems from microwatts to megawatts. Norbert Doerry comments on this need in his paper.16

Beyond post-graduate education the officer and civilian assignment process and career progression needs to be adjusted to allow for longer assignments that will provide opportunity to see programs advance through several phases so that real performance can be measured and real satisfaction obtained from executing a difficult engineering task.

It will be argued that post-graduate education at a first-rank institution is expensive as is the time of the individual being educated. But, compared with the cost burden of mediocre technical work, such expense is a drop in the bucket.

Technological Challenges and Opportunities

C4ISR and Battle Management Systems

The integration of advanced C4ISR and battle management systems into ships has emerged as arguably the major naval engineering challenge in any modern warship design. C4ISR systems are the major connection of the warship to the battlespace. They must be designed for all-weather, continuous operation for months at a time. They must operate in real time in the face of environmental and adversarial warfighting challenges. They must be able to make highly reliable differentiations between potential and real threats as compared to non-threatening activities of non-combatants. All this must be accomplished at very great ranges far over the horizon and often far inland with built-in response times measured in seconds dealing with events unfolding at very high speed. They must operate, both synchronously and asynchronously, with an array of like systems on other platforms, and readily interoperate in joint service with other U.S. forces and allies. They must sustain high data-rate communications through wireless links. They must be operable and maintainable by young people with prescribed, but circumscribed training. They must be secure. They must be able to control their own forces ordnance while simultaneously evaluating the adversary’s defensive and offensive operations. And, they must be able to be built, installed and maintained in ships at reasonable costs, in configurations that are maximally economic in volume, surface area, weight, and power consumption. And increasingly, the C4ISR systems, dealing with the warfighting environment external to the ship, must be connected to own ships computer systems and sensors that automate functionality required for operation of the ship’s HM&E equipment.

Historically, as electronic systems, like radio and then radar and sonar, began to be linked electronically to fire control systems, the real-time nature and complexity of the connections and programming created close-coupled tightly integrated complexes of sensors, computers, and software programs. Very refined and efficient computer program code was necessary to process the sensor data in real time. These computational skills were at the heart of very successful systems that fundamentally changed the nature of defending the battle group.

Now computer technology has advanced in both speed and capacity and many more functions are facilitated by computation. These advances have led to the viability of new open architectures for the computational support of both the C4ISR and battle management systems and the HM&E. Open architectures are those in which many different computer programs and

16 Few midshipmen select electrical engineering as a major at USNA. The subject matter is inherently difficult for most students. High grades improve the odds of mids getting their choices of service in the various navy or marine corps specialties upon graduation. This may motivate mids to select easy majors.

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different kinds of computers can communicate efficiently through a network facilitated by specified interfaces.

Eventually limits to the continued high rate of increase in computational speed and capacity may occur, but for a least another generation of naval engineered systems, computer capability improvement can be expected to continue at an undiminished rate. Open architecture is fundamental to positioning engineered naval systems in both C4ISR and HM&E to be able to be easily upgraded as new functionality and precision is enabled by computer capability. And open architecture is fundamental to achieving for each sub-system some level of independence in operation so that a failure or logic flaw in one sub-system does not bring the collection of sub-systems to failure. In practice, complex systems with ever expanding functionality depending on centralized computing have proven to be excessively difficult and expensive to create, maintain and modernize. Open architecture supporting networked functionality offers a superior alternative. Unmanned Systems and Information Networks

Unmanned systems and information networks are two technical areas that are experiencing an accelerating pace of innovation and rapidly expanding functionality. These topics certainly could be considered separately but they are considered together in this discussion to emphasize the point that the two areas feed off each other. The unmanned systems are increasingly autonomous and are performing more complex tasks. But, that means that the command and control task is becoming more complex requiring more information to be received by the command authority with more complex orders to be given to the autonomous system. For the naval engineer these systems bring many special challenges.

What immediately comes to mind under the topic of unmanned systems are unmanned vehicles such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), unmanned undersea vehicles (UUV), unmanned surface vehicles (USV), and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). For shorthand consider that the acronym UxV encompasses all of these types. But, there are also to be considered fixed systems performing more and more complex tasks without operator intervention. Of course, automation has a very long history, but the range and depth of application is expanding very rapidly.17

The naval engineer needs to understand these technical areas so that future ships can accommodate the needs of UxV including the complexities of connectivity in naval tele-communications and the launch, retrieval, stowage, arming and re-arming and maintenance of the vehicles. The buzz phrase that applies is “dull, dirty, and dangerous.” Highly repetitious tasks, tasks involving intimate contact with unsavory conditions and tasks that place people in imminent danger, abound in military service. Better to send a machine. But, the machines are expensive and also need care. Future navy ships will be bases for an increasing variety of UxV. Thought should be given now to concepts for developing interfaces with standards not only in communication protocols but also with respect to the physical management of these systems aboard ship. At this stage there is probably not enough experience to develop very specific and detailed standards, but the early identification of a structured approach to this subject should pay-off later in ease of accommodation of these new capabilities. The ship-to-UxV interface methodology can be modeled after the way that the ship to naval aircraft interface has evolved.

17 James Clerk Maxwell’s paper for the Royal Society in 1868 titled On Governors comes to mind as a landmark in the development of automation.


The development of the UUV as an effective adjunct capability in undersea warfare is particularly challenging with respect to powering the UUV. The whole concept of the submarine was radically altered by the advent of nuclear propulsion providing essentially unlimited undersea endurance subsequently combined with quieting technology to provide persistent stealth carrying long range acoustic sensors and a lot of offensive fire power. Given the inherent command and control risks associated with UUV, nuclear power is not in the cards for UUV for the foreseeable future. The UUV will probably have to grow in size to accommodate enough propulsion energy storage to carry out far forward missions. Larger UUV will mean more complex systems for delivering the UUV to an area of interest and supporting its operation for a mission of reasonable length and complexity. The future of really effective UUV may lie in the direction of what would be essentially an unmanned diesel electric submarine.

In addition to engineering to accommodate UxV, the naval engineer needs increasing sophistication in applying automation for the performance of more complex functions by ship installed equipment, leading to fewer people required for operation. There are important obstacles to be overcome in reducing manning aboard ships through automation. The consequences of the failure including failure from battle damage, of a highly automated system must be considered. Failure can take many forms, including a failure in the functionality of the equipment itself or in the connectivity of information about its performance. In the case of battle damage or a serious accident such as a collision that disrupts the performance of the highly automated equipment, are there enough sailors on board with the right training to save the ship and themselves? The naval engineer must become sophisticated in the analysis of potential failures and the evaluation of risks.18 But, despite the concerns and a lot of hand-wringing concerning manning for damage control and maintenance, the pattern is well established that manning will be reduced, as confidence in the automation of more and more complex tasks advances. The LCS, designed for a very small crew, will deploy USV and UUV as elements of mission packages. The LCS will be a test of the concept of a small crew operating a warship.

As the navy gains experience with USV they will probably acquire more functionality. Those gains in functionality may cause operators to want larger USV with longer range and more capability. Indeed as computer technology continues to advance and with it the capabilities of artificial intelligence it becomes possible to imagine some types of naval ships themselves becoming autonomous unmanned systems.

Ship equipment needs to be designed with sensors and controllers that can execute the required functionality of the machine, monitor conditions, shut down under certain circumstances, and ask for help from a human operator when options for self-analysis and automatic reconfiguration to maintain operations are exhausted. These types of capabilities will require many sensors, on machine processing and various levels of redundancy in functionality. These kinds of technologies add to the costs of the machines but are supposed to deliver lower costs in operation through reduced manning and lower maintenance costs. More sophisticated tools for system cost engineering are necessary to evaluate the trade-offs over the long life of HM&E shipboard equipment between the investment in automation and the operational cost savings. The technology of a particular level of automation needs to be thoroughly tested in advance of the commitment to use the technology in a ship design. Once committed to an incremental reduction in manning, based on the automation of a particular function, adding back the support for additional crew members, in the event that the automation doesn’t succeed, is very difficult. 18 Bilal M. Ayyub’s Risk Analysis in Engineering and Economics is a helpful text in connection with this topic.

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Sensor technology for automating shipboard systems needs a major technical advance. The present day technology requires lots of small capacity electrical wiring. The little wires, both for signals and power to the sensors, are running amok. What are needed are wireless sensors that harvest power parasitically. These wireless sensors can then use radio frequency (RF) technology to transmit the sensed data to transceivers in a compartment. The transceivers will in turn transmit the data to the computer that does the data processing, analysis, directs control actions and displays information to the human operator. The technologies for the miniaturization of the sensors and the RF transmit and receive function are readily available. Not yet available are technologies for scavenging adequate power to operate the sensors and the RF transmitter. Batteries are not an answer because of the potentially large number of sensors and the attendant need to replace batteries at intervals depending on the service. But, in ship machinery spaces, the lights are usually on for photovoltaic power, the ship is usually in micro- and macro-motion for power generation by mini-flywheel systems with mechanics like self-winding watches, and there is other physics that might be brought to bear for this needed innovation. Such a system involving hundreds of thousands of wireless sensors would need coding to de-conflict the plethora of signals and to prevent electromagnetic interference from generating false data. Lastly, the algorithms applied to the data transmission should probably work off of exceedances in the values being measured in order to minimize the power needs. That is to say, that the sensor would not report data reflecting normal operation on a continuous basis. It would only report periodically for purposes of system integrity and otherwise only when the value of a parameter being measured falls outside of a normal range. An R&D investment in such technology would have a lot of non-naval, industrial applications. It would reduce the volume of small electrical cables in our ships and the expense of installing them in construction, which is considerable. For naval applications the wireless ship systems automation technology and, for that matter combatant ship electronics of every type, needs to be designed to resist the effects of the electromagnetic pulse that is generated by the detonation of a nuclear device.

This section on unmanned systems and networks has discussed the implications of this technology for ship integration issues. But, of course, the high importance of unmanned systems lies in the new war-fighting capabilities that have achieved prominence in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The use of unmanned vehicles has had dramatic effects. That subject is much discussed elsewhere and will not be examined further in this paper.19 Electrification of Almost All Functionality This paper would not be complete without discussing the importance of further electrification of warship designs. Historical data show a continuing increase in the installed electric generating capacity in ships. Paul Sullivan discusses the importance of further electrification of functionality in his paper as does Norbert Doerry in his paper.

It is important to recognize at the outset of an electric ship discussion that electric drive propulsion will probably always be less efficient than mechanical drive purely in terms of losses in the propulsion train. Electric drive requires a conversion of the power generated in a prime mover, often a turbine, into electricity through a generator which must then be converted back to mechanical power in the ships propulsor. Mechanical drive requires only one step in reducing the high turbine RPM (revolutions per minute) to a low RPM compatible with the efficient hydrodynamic design of a propulsor. More power is consumed in the two electric drive 19 Singer, P. W. Wired for War. The Penguin Press, 2009.


conversion steps than in a typical highly efficient mechanical reduction gear. And, most studies show that at the current state of development of the various electrical technologies that are applicable to the system design of an electric warship, the electric ship will have to be a little bigger than its mechanical drive counterpart to contain the necessary electric components. How does a bigger, less efficient ship cost less?

The economies of highly electric ships using electric drive propulsion derive from the hydrodynamics of propulsion combined with the projected power demand for future equipment such as very large long-range radars and even the possibility of electric weapons. Experience has shown that in many situations it is desirable for a warship to have a relatively high-speed capability. But, high speed comes at a very great price in power. For a submerged submarine the power required to make speed varies as the cube of speed. For a surface ship power needs vary as something close to the fifth power of speed. Even in war most ships use their high speed infrequently. But, if needed, the need is probably urgent and the speed must be available. But, most of the time warships carry a lot of installed cost for powerful engines that are not working near capacity. If some of that power could be ported for increments of time to other services such as powering the radar, then the ship could use one set of powerful prime movers to generate power that could power either the radar or the propel the ship. That changes the analytic basis for determining how much total installed power is needed. Does the ship need to make maximum speed at the same time that it is putting out the most powerful radar beams? Although the answer to that question could be yes, in most of the plausible scenarios, it is no. The detailed analysis is complex having to do with the continuous demand for propulsion power and a pulsed demand for radar. Should the circumstance arise in which all of the non-propulsion electric power installed demand is required at the same time as maximum speed, only a small speed reduction results. So, if the ship is designed with one set of prime movers, feeding one set of generators delivering power to a bus from which the power can be extracted for both propulsion and all of the other powered functionality of the ship, then there ought to be cost savings. This kind of system is referred to as integrated electric drive.

The cost savings come from the idea that in return for one set of larger generators fewer turbines are needed because turbines to power a separate electric plant are not needed. Expensive reduction gears and their support systems can also be eliminated. Somewhat offsetting these savings is the need for more extensive electric plant equipment, but generally that is equipment for which there is a large commercial industrial base, unlike naval ship reduction gears.

Other possible cost savings, requiring more development are potentially available. In commercial marine engineering in both large and small vessels, integrated electric power systems have become routine. In many designs propulsion motors are integrated with the propellers in a rotatable pod. In a more advanced design the propulsion motor could be made integral with the propulsor such that the blades of the propulsor are the frame for the propulsion motor rotor. Integrated propeller/motor technology would allow the elimination of propeller shafts, for additional savings. If these propulsor motors are in rotatable pods, such are now used on some cruise ships and offshore service and supply ships, rudders are eliminated.

In addition to electric propulsion, other functionality should be electrified such as actuators of various kinds. A large electro–mechanical actuator is being developed for a specific submarine application to demonstrate the workability of the technology. The electrification of functions, eliminating hydraulic and pneumatic systems would allow the substitution of electric cabling and bus-work for distributed piping systems. As costly as electrical cables are they are less costly to install and maintain than piping systems.

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Electrical systems are inherently compatible with computer control. More electrification should facilitate automation and hence cost savings through reduced manning.

In the CVN 78 design the catapults for launching aircraft are linear electric motors rather than steam powered pistons. The Electro-Magnetic Aircraft Launching System (EMALS) has been developed to reduce the launch loads on aircraft by providing smoother acceleration and to reduce the cost of maintenance for the steam catapults. EMALS equipment is very different from the steam catapult equipment and requires a substantially different internal configuration in the ship for the aircraft launch function.

Norbert Doerry’s paper contains a discussion of the navy plan for the Next Generation Integrated Power System. DDG 1000 is under construction at Bath Iron Works as an integrated electric drive ship. These applications are forerunners of much more to come in the electrification of shipboard equipment. Integrated electric drive ship technology introduces many new marine electrical engineering challenges and opportunities. This is another area in which the navy will need to settle on standards and specifications but with the realization that the technology will be in a state of relatively rapid change for some time to come.

As mentioned earlier, the naval engineering leadership needs to emphasize electrical engineering in selecting practitioners for the future. One sure forecast for the technological future of the navy is that it will continue the long trend in increasing the use of electrical and electronic systems, probably at an accelerating pace.

Rapid Change in the Technologies and Processes of Design and Analysis The technology of the design and engineering analysis tools that are extensively used by the most advanced naval ship design companies, such as General Dynamics, Electric Boat Corporation is also improving at an accelerating rate. The modern design is executed as a product model. Routine engineering analysis, as for example in determining the strength of a structural detail, can be done on the fly by analytic tools that are built into the software of the design tool. Physics-based simulation capabilities are available with which to understand the probable performance of an emerging design. The presentation of designs for review can be conducted with the product model being shown and manipulated through linked computers at disparate locations. There are kinetic and dynamic capabilities to demonstrate on the computer screen how the design works. There are immersive displays in which the designer or reviewer can move through the simulation and perform various simulated actions. These are marvelous capabilities, but there are issues that need to be resolved for more efficient ship design.

The scale of design activity for a modern combatant is huge. At Electric Boat during the period in which the company was completing the VIRGINIA Class design and performing the JIMMY CARTER ocean engineering design and the SSGN conversion design, the design and engineering workforce consisted of some 3,000 people about evenly divided between designers and engineers. The number of people working on the CVN 78 design is an even larger number. The processes that are employed to keep all of the concurrent design activity controlled and synchronized are a field of expertise of their own.

Several large-scale product model tools have been developed, for example CATIA™, Ship Constructor™, and Intergraph™. These are proprietary tools, and they are not interchangeable in the same project in the current state of the development of the technology. For a number of years, the National Shipbuilding Research Program (NSRP), that struggles for funding adequate for its tasks, has been working in coordination with other industry groups in


pursuing a Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP). A STEP translator would allow a design product from one product model to be translated into a different company’s product model. There has been progress in attaining a comprehensive, fully functional STEP, but the work is not complete.20 Achieving this capability so that it worked with very high fidelity creates many opportunities to save money in design and engineering. For example, it would facilitate a direct input of vendor design data into an evolving ship design product model.21 It would facilitate the process of one shipbuilder design agent, in a slack period, supplementing the work of a design agent in another shipbuilder who has to expand his resources to meet his workload. Most importantly it would allow a fully parts-based design to be assembled virtually, including models provided by vendors, with mainly reusable virtual parts each bringing with it all of its characteristics.

The navy’s naval engineers need to become much more knowledgeable and demanding customers in the area of design and analysis tools. To a large extent this has been viewed within the navy as an expertise that is provided by the shipbuilder design agent. The shipbuilder design agents in turn acquire this capability from the companies that serve large scale design and engineering companies and programs in every industry across the globe. The shipbuilders need help from the navy and probably from the level of OSD in developing customer oriented specifications with enough buying power to be able to influence the product model developers to provide fully STEP compliant solutions. Environmental Sensitivity There is a lot of talk about minimizing total ownership costs (TOC) among the defense leadership. An aspect of minimizing TOC is to design for minimum environmental impact. Ships are assemblages of numerous parts using many different kinds of materials. In operation they are micro environments with controlled climates providing all of the services of a small city or village. Ships last a long time. Some material that may have seemed benign when it was included in a ship design may be determined to be environmentally difficult by the time the last ship of a design goes out of service. Naval engineers need to be very curious concerning the potential environmental implications of their designs. In the VIRGINIA Class design special design procedures and reviews were conducted to minimize the use of materials or features that seemed likely to impose costs of remediation during operation or the eventual disposal.

Environmental concerns related to ship operations must also be taken into account. Over the last 25 years a variety of environmental concerns must be addressed by the naval engineer and blended into a successful design. Engine exhaust emissions are subject to controls for air quality. Shipyards are subject to controlling emissions from the process of coating the hulls of ships. Sewage and other waste streams must be treated. The once common practice of using a

20 ISO 10303 called STEP for Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data is the relevant standard. The application of STEP to shipbuilding product models has been facilitated for sometime by NSRP. But the work is slow going for several reasons. It is difficult to understand the details, and it is resisted by the companies that provide the proprietary tools. Because progress has been slow it is difficult to sustain funding for this important effort. 21 In the LCS program mission packages are being designed in navy warfare centers. Each is using design tools and skills acquired over time, like Pro Engineer™, but different warfare centers have different capabilities. When the prototypes are tested and validated, the designs are turned over to a contractor for procurement of the tactical hardware. That contractor redesigns the package in CATIA™. The availability of a translator would eliminate most of this cost.

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tank for fuel and converting it to a ballast tank when the fuel has been consumed has become problematic due to the need to eliminate oil discharges from ships. Ballast water may have to be treated to prevent the inadvertent spread of biologics from one ecosystem to another. Increasing environmental concerns will create additional needs for innovative, naval-engineered preventatives and the naval engineer must be conversant with the environmentalist culture of regulation.

Naval engineers need to be experts in system designs that minimize adverse environmental impacts from the entire life cycle of a ship…construction, operation, maintenance, and end-of-life scrapping. Reduced Maintenance Costs, Higher Reliability, and More Time on Station for Assets As mentioned elsewhere in this paper, defense leadership presses the case for reduction of TOC. For the naval engineer, that translates into features in the design and acquisition of ships and other naval engineering products that will reduce the costs of maintenance and lead to higher equipment reliability with more time on station for the capability that the ship brings. Reducing maintenance costs and increasing the operational availability of the assets probably means upfront costs in the choices of materials and the inclusion of features to facilitate maintenance like rotable equipment pools and preplanned logistic paths for the removal and re-installation of equipment as in the TRIDENT submarines or the gas turbine removal and re-installation paths designed into gas turbine powered ships since the DD-963 Class built in the 1970s. As discussed previously extensive use of sensors inside the ship for sensing the performance details of machinery and electronics can provide advance warning of equipment deterioration allowing intervention before failure. The data from these sensors can be transmitted ashore for additional analysis and advice to the maintainers. Engineered maintenance plans synched with operational commitments, as in TRIDENT, is a proven method of increasing the operational availability of ships. In a noteworthy development, the two-crew concept for each of the LCS ships should allow for more utility of the asset at sea and less in port time. Like TRIDENT, one crew is ashore for training and leave and the other crew is at sea operating the ship. For LCS there is the additional feature of the separate crew that comes aboard with the mission package. This multi-crew concept should provide for extended operations at sea in different missions, if the ship itself turns out to be reliable and easily maintained in the short periods of crew swap.

Engineered maintenance paths and two crew concepts cost more in acquisition and support. For example the two crew concept implies more investment in simulators and training facilities ashore. Engineered maintenance paths cost in internal volume, and extra large openings for equipment handling, features that make the ship a bit bigger and therefore require additional power to make speed.

Analysis of the TOC experience for ships with the specific objective of determining the system costs and benefits for various TOC reduction strategies should produce guidance for new programs allowing naval engineers to make these kinds of decisions on a highly systematic basis.22

22 The OSD LCS Program Support Review Team asked the navy for analysis linking the provision of weight margins in the design of ships to the effect on the ease of modernization of a ship during its service life. Data concerning weight and other growth margins such as for electric power were provided along with policy statements as to requirements for service life margins, but cost–benefit analysis was not provided.


Integrated Training and Faster than Real-Time Simulation of Engagements

As part of the capabilities of the sensor, combat control, and telecommunications in a warship the navy needs to include integrated faster than real-time simulation of the ships warfighting capabilities. This capability would facilitate training at sea and could even assume the role of a decision aid during engagements. Such features allow the navy to get more sea time out of the ships, another way of making fewer ships stretch to cover commitments.

Modularity In two important ways the naval engineer needs to think in terms of modules. One modular concept that has been mentioned earlier is to design the ship as a truck and the combat capability as cargo. The LCS program is designed around that idea with mission packages bringing the bulk of the war-fighting capability to the ship in the form of interchangeable modules that match controlled ship interfaces but bring different kinds of capabilities. One package facilitates the ship for mine detection and clearance. A different package provides an anti-surface warfare capability. The mission packages are developed separately from the ship. Each mission package comes with its own crew and ancillary equipment. The change-out of mission packages can be done in a port of convenience in a couple of days. The LCS program modular concept takes this concept to a new level for the navy though as was pointed out earlier it is an outgrowth of a long experience of using common launchers for more than one type of weapon and a basic flight deck and hangar deck concept to support several generations of carrier aircraft. Expanding the idea of open architecture and “plug ‘n play” beyond the technology of computation hardware and software should be a paradigm for future naval engineering. The key to making these ideas effective is the development of standards with sufficient specificity to assure the integrity of the concept but with sufficient flexibility to allow the standard to remain valid through several generations of technology.

The second major concept in modularity applies to the design and construction of the ship itself. More on this later in the paper. More Stealth

Stealth technology in naval engineering has long been the special characteristic of the submarine program associated with quieting the acoustic emanations of the ship that are detectable by passive sonar. In conjunction with the quieting of submarines more discriminating sonars are needed to detect the ever quieter adversary. The value of the quieting in allowing submarines to perform their missions is undeniable. The competition between more capable listening equipment and quieter submarines is expensive and is not over yet. Each incremental improvement in quieting is likely to be more costly than the last because the technology has already reached the point at which all of the easy and most of the pretty hard problems have already been solved. Absent some fundamental discovery that creates a wholly new concept these costs will have to be borne to sustain superiority in the capability.

Now stealth across most of the electromagnetic spectrum has become an important characteristic of the design of surface combatants. Radar and even infrared and ultra-violet detectability are becoming signature issues with which naval engineers must deal in the ship design. Becoming invisible at light frequencies is postulated but that must surely be a long time

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in the future for any practical system, even a small object, let alone a ship-sized entity. Surface combatant stealth takes the form of geometry and coatings that can reduce the radar cross-section of the ship to some level. As a practical matter the aim is to bring the ship signature as perceived by the seeker on an incoming weapon to a level comfortably below the signature of easily deployed countermeasures. This requires a very clean ship design of carefully controlled external geometry and possibly the addition of specialized coatings. These features impose special demands on the operators of the ship who must maintain the integrity of these design features through the life of the ship. The naval engineers have to stay abreast of potential future developments in missile seeker technologies as well as the capabilities of countermeasures and how they are to be deployed as well as the command and control of sensing, detection, and classification of the threat and deployment of the countermeasures. The same logic applies to the deployment of acoustic countermeasures from submarines.

Stealth is costly. Continuing investment in technology that reduces the cost of stealth is needed. More Powerful Energetics

An area of naval engineering in which the navy is radically underinvested is that associated with energetics. Investment in basic research in energetics is essentially nil. This situation has arisen for two reasons. First, it appears that funds that may otherwise have been used for future energetics were re-directed toward electric weapons. While investment in electric weapons may very well be important in the future it is unlikely that electric weapons will obviate the need for energetic materials. Indeed some researchers believe that there are important synergies between energetic materials and electric weapons. Second, the chemistry of conventional energetic material molecules involving hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen is well understood. But, other chemistries with much greater energetic content per unit of weight remain to be developed into useful formulations. Better energetic materials would lead to new, more effective weapons or more compact weapons meaning less weight and volume to transport to the battlefield for the same level of performance.

Perhaps because energetics requires specialized facilities for research with a measure of isolation for safety, navy work in energetics seems to be somewhat marginalized in the systems engineering of weapons. This physical isolation of the energetics practitioners as participants in a robust weapon design process is probably exacerbated by the lengthy process required to develop a new energetic material, validate the safety of manufacturing processes to be used to produce the material and validate the safety and stability of the product in manufacture, transportation and storage in the confined spaces on board ship, and in application. To a very large extent energetics is an empirical science. Energetics needs significant investment in modeling and simulation tools for what might be called analytical energetics.23

One of the most important functions of naval engineering systems is to disrupt or destroy the enemy by putting ordnance or high energy destructive effects on target. Naval engineering systems need to be integrated across all of the technologies that contribute to that end from information gathering and dissemination through to the demonstrated capacity to destroy enemy capabilities.

23 Stern, A.G. Analytical Energetics-The Critical Need to Move Beyond Empiricism in the Science of Energetic Materials, Presentation to the Patuxent Partnership Panel, February 3, 2010.


Larger, Longer Range Sensors The long-term trends for larger, more integrated sensor systems seem likely to continue into the future. Both sonar undersea and radar in the air must be designed to detect, track, discriminate, and classify ever stealthier targets at greater ranges. Because the sensor systems continue to become more and more sensitive, they detect many more entities and must become more discriminating to sort out contacts of interest from all of the other signals. Generally longer range means more powerful and usually larger systems that become one of the more dominant aspects of the design of warship hulls. At the end of World War II sensors were small pieces of equipment that made small demands on the naval engineer for placement aboard the ship. Now long-range radar and sonar systems need long baselines claiming a large unfettered area of the external surface of the ship. These very extensive sensor systems need a lot of processing power with which to extract all of the potentially available information from the signals received. Long-range radars also require a lot of electric power that, as discussed earlier, feeds the need for more electric power generation in the ship. More networking of sensors on multiple hulls and from aircraft and satellites will further extend the range and discrimination of sensors and it will increase the complexity of the integration of these systems, which will enable the creation of integrated war-fighter pictures (IWP), and facilitate battle-force–level battle management and command and control capabilities. For example, future developments and expansion of the emerging Navy Integrated Fire Control–Counter Air (NIFC-CA) capability will provide the foundation for future navy battle force battle management and command and control capabilities, such as force-wide distributed weapons coordination (DWC). None of this technology is likely to be less costly than current systems. There will be comparatively small off-setting cost reductions in manning, as more and more complex functionality is operated by computer systems. Seaborne missile defense systems have to have reaction times that really make real-time human operator analysis, decision making, and actuation impractical or infeasible. Most of the capability will have to be entrusted to automation, doctrine, and pre-planned responses. Industrial Challenges and Opportunities Design–Build The fundamental idea of design–build is to recognize that for a very complex and extensive product the design and building of the product is best done if the two processes are executed in a highly integrated way in a supportive business process.24 The designer needs intimate knowledge of how the product is to be built. The designer needs access to the individuals who will build the product and the builder needs access to the designers to be sure that the builder understands why the design is as it is. This idea stands in opposition to the idea of a design conceived to support a competition among builders. Design–build brings into a single entity clear responsibility for the outcome of two conjoined complex processes. Design–build is a business and contracting concept in establishing clear responsibility and accountability for the delivery of a complex product. Design–build facilitates the free flow of vital information. In design–build the detail design and construction of the lead ship of a class should be at the same shipbuilder designer company executed in the same contract. But, just aligning the contract in that manner is not enough. The company needs to be committed to a 24Wikipedia has an excellent discussion of the background of the history and basis of design–build.

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design process that takes full advantage of the shipbuilder’s construction processes by a vigorous, interactive use of construction expertise at every stage of the design. It is not enough for the naval engineer to be knowledgeable concerning the design and engineering of the ship. The naval engineer must also understand the technology of the industrial capabilities that will be used in construction. The design–build methods should be a continuing process during the construction of a class with the navy and the builder always looking for opportunities to improve the process and reduce costs. The concept of design–build would be greatly facilitated by the navy re-structuring its basic business concept of acquiring ships to establish a navy-industrial ship product line team for each major ship type. Modular Fabrication and Assembly Earlier in this paper the virtues of treating a ship as a truck with modular war-fighting capabilities that could be easily changed to keep up with emerging needs. In this section another kind of modularity will be discussed associated with the construction of the ship in modules. Ships need to be designed to be built in a factory environment to the maximum possible extent. Shipbuilders refer to the 1-3-8 rule. By that they mean that an increment of work that can be done in the shop for 1 man-hour will take 3 man-hours if it is done in the partially assembled ship on the building ways or in the graving dock and 8 man-hours if must be done in the ship after launch. This is a “thumb-rule” that has often been validated. It drives the builder to want to accomplish as much work as possible in the shop environment. This means designing the ship and developing both the technology of the ship and the technology of the industrial processes that will be used to build the ship in a synergistic way through a modular approach.

Modular construction is enabled by accuracy and the ability to move large, heavy modules through the plant and eventually into the launch facility. Accuracy is enabled by automated tooling and by processes designed for a well-trained workforce. Handling heavy weights is a matter of fixtures and equipment. Modular construction is also enabled by a ship design that is based on a modular construction plan. In U.S. submarine shipbuilding modern modular construction began in the TRIDENT program.25 The basic idea was applied in the later SSN 688 Class ships and it was beneficial, but as experience accrued, it became clear that designed in modularity would multiply the benefits. The SEAWOLF included even more features than TRIDENT to facilitate modular construction. In the VIRGINIA Class now a very experienced and capable design agent and two experienced shipbuilders further extended these ideas including innovations in the technology of the ship itself to facilitate the process.

In the VIRGINIA Class design after a careful testing and validation process the navy authorized the design agent to allow electric cables to be spliced. Because the integrity of electric cables is critically important to the functioning of the attached equipment and because a fault in a cable will produce heat and the risk of fire, cable splicing had been viewed as a process only to

25 In World War II the Germans pioneered modular construction of U-boats. Somewhat similar techniques were used in the United States for the construction of some ships for the World War II merchant ship fleet. The author was personally involved in the construction of the deep diving research submarine, USS DOLPHIN AGSS 555, built at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in the late ‘60s, using modular construction techniques similar to those applied by Electric Boat in TRIDENT and subsequent U.S. submarine classes. However, there was no continuity of intellectual evolution to the author’s knowledge connecting the German modular construction experience to that used to build DOLPHIN and that which emerged in TRIDENT. The introduction of modular construction into surface ship programs has been heavily influenced by the General Dynamics shipyards led by Electric Boat.


be used in emergencies for a voyage repair, but not allowed in new construction. This was based on the simple idea that any splice introduces a risk to the integrity of the cable that is simply not there in the continuous cable as manufactured. But if splicing could be allowed in new construction and the ship was designed to accommodate the practice, modules could be completely cabled when they were still in the shop environment with cables that span between modules to be joined when the modules were brought together. This led to a much higher state of completion of modules and opened the way for a lot of system testing while the ship was still in large pieces, that is to say modules, in the shop. The designer is then motivated to further the process by designing modules that minimize the number and complexity of interfaces between modules to allow more testing and a higher state of completion in the shop. That in turn engenders a need for facilitization to be able to handle heavier units. The naval engineer involved in developing technologies for functional requirements and designing them into the ship must also design for the evolving industrial process of assembling ships from larger more complete modules. Electrification discussed in an earlier section of this paper helps modularity because the thoroughly tested and validated cable splicing process has proven to be inexpensive. Distributed systems that are electrical can be tested more easily than hydraulic and pneumatic systems facilitating a higher state of testing of the ship while it is still in pieces in the shop. Extensive automation of ship systems introduces a new consideration with respect to the testing of ship systems on a modular basis. Now the designer needs to consider the relationship of the automation features to the ships equipment so that operational testing can be performed on equipment in a module. That probably means either a module by module approach to autonomy or an investment in test simulation systems. The future demand for more capable warships using more advanced technology probably means more cost. The best hedge against those upward pressures on cost is for better, more efficient shipbuilding. Better more efficient shipbuilding means more attention to shipbuilding facilitization, processes and training including design-build and modular construction. CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERT NAVAL ENGINEERS Skills and Tools In this section there is a series of topics with questions following the topic headings that form a kind of check list of elements of knowledge and experience that ought to be in the portfolio of the accomplished naval engineer. Research and Development

How does the nation create new science and technology relevant to complex systems? What is the role of government vis à vis private industry. How does a practicing engineer in a company that is part of a systems engineering team, working on an intensively engineered system, pick and choose among technology options either established or new? How is technical risk evaluated with respect to cost and performance? How can an engineer working in R&D be sure that the work being performed is actually advancing the state of the art? How do intellectual property

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issues interact with the R&D process? How do the structural motivations of the various participants in the R&D process (i.e., government R&D agency program managers, academics, government labs, acquisition program managers, prime contractors, sub-contractors, and small businesses) affect the hand-off of technical advancements from basic science to deployed systems? What are effective techniques for reviewing programs not only by peers and subject matter experts but also by individuals with overarching views of technical priorities and connection to broader purposes?

Standardization and Innovation

What trade-offs are involved in technology choices between standards and innovative new technology in engineering a complex system? What factors are important in balancing risks, performance benefits, and logistic support in deciding to stick with tried, true, and standardized technical elements or reaching for innovations that promise significant performance benefits? What is the relationship between standardization and logistic support? Where do specifications fit into the engineering process? How are specifications created? Why and for whom? How are they revised as errors are found or as new technology becomes available that affects the specification? Design and Engineering Tools How should an engineer think about the logic chain connecting physics with mathematics with computation with modeling with simulation with real-time system performance? How is design and engineering done in practice? What does the future look like in CAE, CAD, CAM, multi-physics modeling tools and programs enabling collaboration among dispersed engineering teams? How and when is it necessary to perform physical tests to verify and validate the electronically enabled work of the designers and engineers? What are the basics in the relationship between design and engineering? What would be the methodology, benefits, and issues involved in basing engineering analysis and specifications on an understanding of probabilities for anticipated performance needs and system capabilities vis à vis traditional requirements and factors of safety? How are technical risks, reliability, availability, and maintainability modeled? Cost Estimating and Budgeting How are the costs of the program or project estimated and budgeted? How should budget reserves be identified and estimated to take in to account future unknowns? What are useful methods of cost estimating? How should cost accounting systems relate to the work breakdown structure that is based on the technical content of the program? How does cost estimating relate to risk? How is total program cost and schedule risk evaluated? [In the case of DDG 1000 with 8 new technological developments embedded in the design, 4 of which involved difficult to substitute HM&E related elements, the ship was still evaluated as low to medium risk! From component to subsystem to system to total ship, it should have been obvious that this vessel (with its embedded total ship computing environment influencing every system on the ship) was high risk. And, in due course, the risks became evident, the budget was busted, and the program has been truncated down to probably at most two ships as was mentioned elsewhere.]


System Engineering Teams

How are teams organized and enabled from small teams performing specific tasks within a larger whole to the great web of interrelated tasks and contracts, agencies, and companies, involved in a major program? How do business interests and financial matters interrelate with technical elements and requirements to drive programs? How are technical interfaces defined within the team to best advantage? How can collaboration among the team members be incentivized? How are technical decisions at various levels made and by whom, using what process?

System Engineering Techniques

How should a complex systems task be subdivided into manageable parts? How are interfaces selected and defined? What is the mission profile for the system, that is, how should the system be viewed from end to end, from earliest concept through operation, maintenance, and eventually disposal? How does manufacturing technology relate to systems engineering? How are trade-offs conducted to realize required performance and best overall performance? What are the techniques and evaluation criteria that can induce higher fidelity into the cost and schedule estimating process for the design and engineering phase, the production phase, and the operational phase of a system? What tests are necessary to correlate and validate across sub-system interfaces? System Certification

Highly engineered systems in which there are serious consequences in the event of failure require mechanisms in design, engineering, manufacture, operation, and maintenance to certify performance. How do these certification schemes work? How do they interact with requirements? Is there a way of thinking about certification that reveals basic principles? What are the issues that arise when new technology is proposed for some significant benefit that is outside the established scope of certification? How do certification systems in different applications compare in defense and in commercial practice (e.g., FAA, pharmaceuticals, building codes, space flight)? How does certification interact with very advanced engineering tools? How can the certifier believe the model? How can new technology be introduced into a system while maintaining certification? To whom should the certifiers be accountable? Test and Evaluation

What is the plan for testing a complex system with many possible combinations of state variables? How should extreme operating conditions be tested or simulated? How often does the system need to be evaluated in service? Are special test capabilities needed to evaluate system performance? Will the testers be objective in the conduct of tests and the evaluation of results? What incremental testing is needed to build up to an end-to-end system test? What should be the limits of testing? What constitutes success?

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Management Methods and Techniques

How should a systems engineer think about the many useful management ideas that emerge, sometimes become a fad, sometimes get misapplied, sometimes get stripped of their rigor and become hype instead of substance (e.g., IPPD, TQM, Lean, Six-Sigma, RBM, Root Cause Analysis, 5S)? Project Management

How are risks identified, characterized, monitored, and retired during the project? How does systems engineering interact with a family of project and program management tools? How does a system engineer schedule, price and monitor work? How does the system engineer complete a task? How does cost engineering and process engineering relate to systems engineering? How should the engineering staff be organized, by discipline or process or system element? What controls are necessary to manage the work? How can innovation be focused to support the cost and schedule requirements for the project? Quality

What quality standards must the parts of the system meet in order to function? What process controls need to be in place? How will quality be measured? What kind of checking will be done during design? Who will do it? What instruments will be used to measure the product? How will the instruments be calibrated? How will the quality of purchased components be assured? Workforce Development

Who will do the work? What education will the practitioners need? What training will need to be done? How many people will be needed? What measures will be needed to develop the workforce into a team? What about safety? How can industrial cultures be changed to embrace new thinking? Innovation and Entrepreneurship

How do new technologies get a foothold? How is funding secured to take new ideas, turn them into inventions, turn the inventions into products, and build markets for the products? How can innovators influence the decisions of those who control funds? What are the keys to effective presentation of innovative technology in the program approval process? How should a DoN naval engineer relate to proprietary information?

Practicing naval engineers will at some time find themselves making judgments and decisions involving most of the topics above. All of these topics will be on the plate of anyone participating at a high level in a major program for a complex highly engineered naval system. Most of the topics are germane to maintenance of the system through life as well as to creating the system. Individuals who find themselves on the path to leading the design and engineering of complex naval systems need experience in addressing these kinds of questions and need exemplars of programs in which these matters have been dealt with successfully as well as learning from programs that failed.


Education, Experience, and Leadership The U.S. Navy has benefited from the services of numbers of brilliant naval engineers, like Dahlgren, Isherwood, Melville, Taylor, Cochrane, Rickover, Smith and Meyer to list the author’s particular favorites. These individuals were well educated in their technical fields. They had the benefit of long careers (on average 44 years of commissioned service) immersed in the technical details of their discipline. They benefited from the best technical educations available in their time, including post-graduate work. They were all naval officers with a deep commitment to the navy and the sense of ownership and pride that comes from serving in uniform. They all carried out their work by leading cadres of uniformed naval personnel, civilian employees of the DoN and other government technical organizations, and technical staffs of private and publicly held corporations. Their legacy is one of unmatched naval superiority.

The technical disciplines in which these naval engineering heroes developed their expertise remain important even today. New technical disciplines are being added for the naval engineers to add to the list of technology that must be mastered for the future.

The U.S. Navy needs to reassess its approach to the selection, education, and assignment of its naval engineering staff. It needs to attract and select very high-quality individuals at the beginning of their careers, provide them with a broad and deep post-graduate engineering education with a core curriculum to provide basics that will apply across most technical areas that future naval engineers will encounter. These curricula should be supplemented by study in individualized areas so that the community taken as a whole will have both breadth and depth. Profound knowledge is needed in naval architecture; marine engineering; ordnance engineering; electrical and electronics engineering; C4ISR and battle management systems engineering; ship and ship system maintenance; and in the industrial processes of design, engineering, manufacturing, construction, and maintenance that deliver and sustain the hardware and software. The members of the community must then be used in assignments that cut across technologies, ship types, and war-fighting sub-specialties. They need breadth to achieve a high-quality integration of many technologies and depth to be able to implement each technical element with rigor. Policies and legislation that would enable longer tours for the uniformed naval engineering leadership and even longer careers should be implemented. SUMMING UP The U.S. Navy agonizes over attaining a balance between the size of the navy in terms of numbers of ships and aircraft and the high cost of acquiring and maintaining evermore advanced technological capabilities.

Reorganizing the process of building the future navy with a simplified, more homogeneous hierarchy, along product lines, as opposed to individual ship class programs, would encourage important technical choices. It would lead to more commonality in the many technical areas in which it makes sense in the interests of lower costs of ownership both in new construction and in maintenance. It would simplify the process of introducing new technology into the product lines to keep them current. If this was done in collaboration with the shipbuilding industry the synergies of design–build could be more fully exploited. Each product line—submarines, surface combatants, amphibious ships, aircraft carriers, combat logistic

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ships—would have its own ship designer–builder company. Those companies would then have more confidence in decisions to deploy capital to modernize facilities and processes. Policy and legislation necessary to so align the industry would only be organizing, managing, and incentivizing a situation, which is to a large extent in place today on a haphazard de facto basis with naïve notions as to some mythical advantage for competition in which there is too little business and too much necessary specialization to sustain the concept. As a further measure to facilitate sharing best practices and commonality in the selection of standards, interfaces, and equipment, both civilian and uniformed naval engineers should be incentivized to move between product lines. For the product line concept to work well, the navy needs a strong professional cadre of naval engineers working in the DoN to lead the process. Getting maximum value from the product line designer-shipbuilding companies will require an in-house navy staff with a lot of industrial field experience. It will also require business incentives for the designer ship-building companies to perform in the absence of the now dysfunctional competitive motivators. Contractor performance can be motivated through aggressive profit share lines that reward the contractor handsomely for excellent performance and penalize the contractor for poor performance. In this process it is important to follow a disciplined process of design maturity and change management. The navy continues a very long-term trend of becoming more technological year over year. Although some technologies reduce costs those that are introduced for the benefit of taking performance to a new higher level usually are more costly than the lesser performing technology they replace. It is unrealistic to believe that the U.S. Navy or its potential adversaries will eschew opportunities for substantial improvements in capability. For example, the emergence of a nuclear missile armed Iran projects the U.S. Navy into a seaborne missile defense capability that will be very expensive. The new peer challenge of China and its coming influence on the future size and capability of our navy looms large if the United States is to maintain a reasonable future presence in the Western Pacific. The best possible preparation for an affordable future for the construction and modernization of the future fleet will be to maintain a highly capable naval engineering workforce and to establish a new kind of program and business concept that simplifies the process along product lines applying all of what is known about how to succeed across all naval engineering products. POSTSCRIPT The modern products of naval engineering are complex and highly integrated. For this author that means that separating variables is hard, and the organization of this paper makes that apparent. The author appreciates the patience of any reader who waded through to the end. In particular several colleagues read this in draft and contributed useful comments, including Mr. George Sawyer, formerly Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Shipbuilding and Logistics), RADM Robert Traister, USN (ret), and Dr. Stephen Woodall, CAPT, USN (ret). Thank you.

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