As the Navy prepares to award a design contract in April for its
next-generation surface combatant, there are conflicting explanations
for the program’s rationale. The Navy says that the DD-X project
will produce a new ship class. But some senior Defense officials
insist in categorizing DD-X as only a “test-bed” for
new technologies.
The Pentagon requested $960 million in fiscal year 2003 to start
developing the DD-X family of ships, which is expected to include
a new cruiser, called CG-X and a smaller vessel for coastal operations,
called the LCS (littoral combat ship). Through fiscal 2007, the
Navy would spend $5.7 billion to complete development and possibly
build the first ship.
A senior Navy budget official who briefed reporters in early February,
however, said that DD-X is a “test-bed” to explore new
technologies and may or may not lead to actual ship construction.
“It’s too early to tell what is going to happen,”
the official said.
Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim said, during a news conference,
that it’s not clear whether any ships will be built under
this program. “I don’t know if [DD-X] will be deployed
as a new class of ships,” said Zakheim. He stressed that the
Navy has yet to articulate specific requirements for a new class
of surface combatants and that many of the decisions will be based
on whether the Navy takes over more missile-defense missions.
But several top Navy officials made it clear in recent remarks
that they do not regard DD-X as only a test-bed. The director of
Navy surface warfare, Rear Adm. Phillip M. Balisle, said that “DD-X
is not a program simply to develop technology. ... [It] will bring
transformation to the fleet.”
Rear Adm. Charles S. Hamilton, program executive officer for surface
strike, explained that the DD-X program will fund a “lead
ship” to be built in fiscal year 2005. That first ship would
serve as the baseline, on which future upgrades would be incorporated.
The idea is to make DD-X a “spiral development” program—a
term used to describe the Defense Department’s preferred approach
to building weapon systems. Spiral development assumes that the
design of a ship is flexible enough that it can be upgraded with
new technologies over a long period of time.
The CG-X, said Hamilton, will be the next-generation cruiser for
missile-defense missions. The LCS will perform, among other functions,
mine- and submarine hunting duties.
The hullforms for DD-X and CG-X probably will be common, he said
during a presentation to the Surface Navy Association. The LCS will
have a different hullform, but similar mission-package technology,
he added.
Zakheim, meanwhile, repeatedly emphasized that DD-X remains a technology
program with no clearly defined ships. “I think they [the
Navy] want a new class of destroyers, but I don’t know what
it’s going to look like,” he told reporters. In briefing
charts, Zakheim listed DD-X as one of the “transformation
highlights” of the fiscal 2003 budget.
But he warned that it’s too early to begin designing a ship
that will not be deployed for another 10 to 20 years, so it makes
sense to “use a new destroyer as a test bed” for new
technologies. “The way we’re going to fight surface
warfare in the future is unlikely to be the way it’s been
fought until now,” said Zakheim.
A delay in the production of a new destroyer would not necessarily
undermine the Navy’s goal of keeping a fleet of 300 ships,
as long as the service continues to build DDG-51 destroyers, he
said.
Some Navy officials seem eager to get DD-X in the fleet as soon
as possible. “We have to transition to DD-X’s new hullform,”
which provides more stealth and safety for sailors, said Rear Adm.
William Cobb Jr., program executive officer for theater surface
combatants. “We can’t continue to build DDGs”
indefinitely, he told the SNA conference.
At the core of the debate surrounding DD-X is the notion that the
Pentagon will not fund a new ship-construction program unless the
platform were viewed as “transformational.” The term
“transformation” has become a buzzword to describe innovative
weapon systems and war-fighting tactics. The predecessor program
to the DD-X—the DD-21 Zumwalt-class destroyer—was cancelled
last year, because Pentagon officials considered it too expensive
and not “transformational” enough, despite high-tech
features such as electric propulsion, a stealthy hullform, advanced
communications technology and a crew one-third smaller than current
destroyers.
The DD-21 became a tough sell, concluded a naval analyst, because
its reason for being was not articulated clearly. “It was
not considered transformational, even though it had electric drive
and low manning and cooperative engagement, because it lacked a
transformation framework,” said Ronald O’Rourke, an
analyst at the Congressional Research Service. “It was difficult
to see how this ship would change things.” The same fate could
await DD-X, unless the surface Navy community puts together “a
strong plan for transformation,” said O’Rourke. “The
Navy does not have a coordinated cluster of new and different programs,
like the Army does, nor does it have a clear transformation framework
like the Air Force does.”
O’Rourke’s observation may suggest that the Navy was
penalized in the 2003 spending plan, which shows increases of $2.2
billion and $5.1 billion for the Army and Air Force procurement
accounts, respectively, but just $600 million for the Navy/Marine
Corps.
There are times when “success can work against you,”
said the Pentagon’s director of force transformation, retired
Vice Adm. Arthur C. Cebrowski. During a roundtable with reporters,
Cebrowski noted that the weapons-acquisition process does not have
much tolerance for failure or for taking financial risks in a program
that may or may not succeed. Even though he did not specifically
mention DD-21, Cebrowski said that some programs fail to show that
“there is a market” for a given system and, therefore,
lose the budget battles. “In the name of efficiency, we pick
winners and losers early,” he said.
The Navy’s budgetary picture may improve in the years ahead,
however. According to Rear Adm. James G. Stavridis, director of
assessments, the service’s 2004-2008 spending plan has $40-$50
billion “for new programs that are transformational.”
The Navy’s overall budget of $108.3 billion for fiscal 2003
is $9.5 billion higher than last year’s, but nevertheless
contains “serious cracks” in the shipbuilding accounts,
which were “inherited” from the previous administration,
said John Young, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development
and acquisition.
The ships currently under construction, for example, are $3 billion
short of the amount needed to complete them, Young said at the Surface
Navy conference.
Given the financial crunch, the Navy had to cut back its shipbuilding
program in 2003 from eight to five ships.
Zakheim predicted that the Navy’s force structure will not
suffer in the long term, despite the reductions. The reason, he
said, is that the average age of the Navy’s fleet is 16 years,
“which is relatively young.” Therefore, “The Navy
felt that it could afford to build only five ships this year,”
Zakheim said. “There were other priorities, such as munitions,
such as readiness that really needed funding more urgently.”
nd