ARTICLE

July 2003

Washington Pulse

by NDIA Staff

Navy to Select New Ship Designs on July 17
The Navy plans to select up to three contractors on July 17 for the next phase of the Littoral Combat Ship program.

Each will receive a $10 million, seven-month contract to refine their designs and concepts. The Navy stipulated that each LCS should cost between $150 million and $220 million. Including the mission systems, the total cost should not exceed $250 million.

In the proposals the Navy received in April from several industry teams, the average price is about $180 million for the hull and about $70 million to $80 million for the mission systems, said Rear Adm. Charles Hamilton, the Navy’s program executive officer for ships.

Hamilton said the first LCS ship will be in operation by fiscal year 2005. “The schedule is aggressive but attainable.”

In a meeting with congressional staffers and contractors, Hamilton commented that he was pleased to see that “all the bidders” had international partners. He noted that naval engineers from countries such as Israel, Sweden, Norway, Australia and New Zealand have more experience in designing the small LCS-type combatants that the U.S. Navy wants. U.S. shipyards, he said, “don’t have that kind of experience.”

Congressional staffers and budget analysts, however, question whether the Navy can afford both the Littoral Combat Ship and a new destroyer, the DD-X. The two are scheduled to go into production simultaneously, possibly draining away dollars from other programs. The Navy will not cancel either ship, even in a budget crunch, said Hamilton. If money gets tight, the strategy is to seek “efficiencies and force structure reductions” Navy-wide, he said.

The Navy plans to save money by adopting systems that will be applicable to both LCS and DD-X, said Hamilton. Examples include a embarkation and debarkation mechanism, and a common control system to operate unmanned vehicles.

Marine Corps Working to Restore Readiness
The much-discussed “reconstitution” of U.S. military forces after the war in Iraq needs to be viewed under a different light this time around, said Gen. Michael W. Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps.

The Defense Department’s emphasis on transformation should prompt the services to carefully decide how they should restore the readiness of their forces and upgrade their equipment, Hagee noted.

“We don’t necessarily want to go back to where we were before Operation Iraqi Freedom,” he told a meeting of defense reporters. It’s not just a matter of “refilling old bins,” he said. “In many cases we will. But in some cases, we don’t want to fill those old bins.”

Marine leaders will have a tough job trying to practically reconstitute the entire Corps. Most of the 65,000 Marines who participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom should be returning in August, but that is not a certainty, Hagee said.

Since last fall, about 68 percent of the Marine Corps has been forward deployed in Iraq and Okinawa, Japan. That includes 80 percent of the infantry battalions, 100 percent of the tank battalions, 100 percent of the light armored vehicle battalions, 100 percent of the amphibious assault vehicle battalions, 100 percent of the Harrier squadrons and 70 percent of the Hornet squadrons.

The war in Iraq reinforced the Marine Corps’ concepts of operations, which focus on “speed and agility,” Hagee said. Areas that need to improve are combat identification, mobilization procedures for reserve forces and intelligence sharing with allies, he explained. Occurrences of “blue on blue” friendly fire are a problem “we need to grasp,” said Hagee.

The mobilization of reserves is too bureaucratic and slows down deployments, he said. “Our reserve mobilization procedures were set up during the Cold War, with the idea to mobilize the entire nation. … We should be able to mobilize differently.”

National Guard Monitors Pace of Deployments
The National Guard is keeping a close eye on the pace of deployments being assigned to its personnel, said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau.

A total of 147,000 Army and Air National Guard personnel are deployed in 44 nations around the world, Blum told a Pentagon news briefing. Their missions range from close combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, peacekeeping in the Balkans and Sinai, homeland security and responding to natural disasters within the United States.

“We are watching that very, very closely,” he said. “We have to be very careful that we don’t go beyond the elasticity that [these soldiers] will tolerate.”

Blum said he is most worried about the patience of those who employ Guard personnel. “How many times can they tolerate the interruption? …

Despite the frequent deployments, Blum said, the Guard is “doing pretty well” in meeting its recruitment and retention goals.

Rumsfeld Vocal About Personnel Reform
Seeking to bolster his case for a broad overhaul of the Pentagon’s personnel system, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that the current civil-service structure severely hampers efforts to recruit and retain talented young workers.

“Some would say [the system] is broken,” he said during a June briefing at the National Press Club.

Rumsfeld was responding to a Brookings Institute survey of 1,002 graduating college seniors that found many of those students would avoid government jobs, because the hiring process is cumbersome and lengthy.

Rumsfeld said the Defense Department is ill equipped to compete with corporate recruiters who can offer students jobs, tell them what the bonuses are and when and where they can start. The government can only offer paperwork and “a promise to get back to them” in three to five months, he added.

At Rumsfeld’s urging, the Bush administration has asked Congress to transform the civil service system and is proposing the creation of a new national security personnel system to manage the Pentagon’s nearly 700,000 civilian employees.

Labor unions and other advocacy groups claim that doing away with decades-old civil service rules could undermine public employees by taking away workers’ rights and making the system more vulnerable to cronyism.

Rumsfeld dismissed the criticism. Further, he stressed that reform is essential to the Pentagon’s efforts to become more efficient by outsourcing to contractors many civilian jobs that today are performed by military personnel.

Approximately 320,000 civilian tasks today are performed by military service members, Rumsfeld said. “We are wasting the skills of military personnel on tasks civilian workers could handle.”

Civil service regulations also have stymied efforts to prosecute fraud; most notably credit card abuse. The government can garnish the wages of uniformed personnel in order to collect on credit card abuse. But it can’t do so with civilian workers.

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