War, the military, COIN and stuff

Navy, Marines Game Out Their Future

U.S. Navy delivering humanitarian supplies ashore in Colombia. (Pic: Paul McLeary)

With the Marine Corps leadership itching to get “expeditionary” again and start placing their Marines back on U.S. Naval vessels after a decade fighting in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, the sea services are starting from square one.

On December 11, the Navy and Marine Corps kicked off Bold Alligator, a simulation that marks the largest joint fleet simulated amphibious exercise in the last 10 years. Brig. Gen. Christopher S. Owens of the II Marine Expeditionary Force, the Marine component of Exercise Bold Alligator, said in a conference call last week that while it's the first brigade-level amphibious exercise in quite some time, “it's also a first step in our revitalization of our amphibious proficiency with larger or brigade-size units” after a decade of kicking sand.

The synthetic exercise—a real, physical exercise is planned for 2012—will be run out of Norfolk from two amphibious assault ships, the USS Bataan and USS Iwo Jima, and will simulate a “hybrid threat environment where U.S. forces have been requested by friendly nations to help bring a measure of security and stability to the area,” Owens said. “With one nation, we'll support their fight against an externally-supported insurgency and repel foreign invaders from within their borders; at the same time, in a neighboring country, we will likely conduct a noncombatant evacuation operation of U.S. citizens in the midst of sectarian violence that is related to the more conventional conflict next door.”

Read the rest at ARES...

The Navy's Submarine Problem

My colleague Mike Fabey had a piece up yesterday about a new Congressional Research Service report that lays out some inconvenient facts about the future of the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet.

In short, the Navy doesn’t seem to have figured out a way to align its stated need for 48 submarines with its build schedule for new Virginia class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), or its yearly shipbuilding budget.

The Navy’s so-called 30-year shipbuilding plan, as updated for Fiscal 2009 and earlier years, showed the SSN force recovering to 48 boats by the early 2030s, the CRS pointed out. But the latest update indicated that benchmark may not be made after all. “The Navy’s new Fiscal 2011 30-year (fiscal years 2011-2040) plan shows the SSN remaining below 48 boats through 2040. The change is due to a reduction in planned SSN procurements,” CRS reported. “The Fiscal 2009 plan included procurement of 53 SSNs over 30 years, while the Fiscal 2011 plan includes procurement of 44 SSNs over 30 years.”

The reduction in SSN procurements in the Fiscal 2011 plan, the CRS reported, may be due in large part to the planned procurement of 12 next-generation SSBNs (nuclear-powered strategic ballistic-missile submarines) in Fiscal 2019-2033. “The Fiscal 2009 plan did not account for the cost of these 12 SSBNs, while the Fiscal 2011 does, apparently causing reductions in planned procurement rates for SSNs and other types of ships during that period,” the CRS reported.

Read the rest at ARES...

What Will the New Littoral Combat Ships Cost?

With the news this morning that the Navy wants to split the buy for twenty new Littoral Combat Ships through 2015—ten from Lockheed Martin and ten from Austal and General Dynamics—it’s instructive to take a quick look at how we got to such an odd moment in a long and odd acquisition process.

Originally slated to cost $220 million per ship when the program was launched in 2002, the first two ships out of the dock had blown that number apart by time they hit the water. In documents that accompanied the 2010 Navy budget request, it was learned that the Lockheed-built ship, the USS Freedom, wound up clocking in at $637 million, while the General Dynamics/Austal-built USS Independence came in at $704 million. Shocking perhaps, but hardly surprising given the confusion that has marked the program from the beginning, which included cancellation of the LCS 3 and 4 builds in 2007, followed by a quick reversal. An angry Congress got into the game by slapping a cost cap of $480 million per ship beginning this year, a figure the Navy has admitted neither company could meet. While Lockheed is currently reporting that LCS 3 is more than 60% complete, General Dynamics/Austal continues work in silence. A spokesman for the team told DTI that it will have no comment on the LCS 4 build at Austal USA shipyards in Alabama before the Navy issues its contract award....

Read the rest at ARES...

Navy Facing "a new fiscal reality"

In the wake of Secretary of Defense Gates calling for Pentagon bean counters to find $100 billion in savings over the next five years, the services are scrambling to cut costs where they can. The process won’t be easy says Adm. Jonathan Greenert, vice chief of Naval Operations, who told the Center for Strategic and International Studies yesterday that upcoming budgets are going to introduce “a new fiscal reality for most of our [officers] and most of our senior executive service. They’ve gone fifteen years on supplemental appropriations. We’ve been on them since at least ’95…and we have really not had a lot of folks really need to be accountable for the fiscal performance out there because there’s always been a supplemental around the corner.”

Greenert didn’t single out any underperforming programs by name, but stressed that the Navy was going to have little patience for programs that are “just not going to get there.” He did say that the service sees multiyear procurement deals for programs as one of many ways to reduce costs, along with a greater focus on fixed-price contracts....

Read the rest over at ARES...

Navy's Adm. Roughead on Tour

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead has been out and about this week with an ambitious agenda talking up everything from cutting $28 billion in budgetary bloat over the next five years, to adding 32 new ships to the Navy’s inventory by 2024, to using more biofuels, to doubling down on unmanned assets.

It has taken the sea service some time to rebound after being publicly shamed by Secretary of Defense Gates last spring, when he told a roomful of Naval officers and journalists that “you don’t necessarily need a billion-dollar guided missile destroyer to chase down and deal with a bunch of teenage pirates wielding AK-47s and RPGs,” and called into question the need for eleven carrier groups. But Roughead is back, and a few days after talking up the possibilities that the concept of offshore balancing holds for giving the Navy more of a role in future conflicts, and laying out plans for a “greener” more energy efficient service in the near future, the Admiral has released his CNO Guidance for 2011.

The guidance states that “we will emphasize the affordable production of multi-mission ships and aircraft, [and] capabilities required not desired.” In other words, we’re not just doing this because we can. But when it comes to shipbuilding, the numbers don’t necessarily look great. As ARES noted recently, the Navy’s shipbuilding plan can only be pulled off successfully if all of the planned Littoral Combat Ships and Joint High Speed Vessels are able to be constructed on time and within certain budgetary constraints. The two variants are set to account for about 25 percent of the Navy’s planned 313-ship fleet, and the success of the LCS program in particular is hardly a done deal.

Read the rest at ARES......

 

 

Shrinking Budgets and Joint Naval Ops

This is also posted over at the ARES blog.

In the interest of providing a little more perspective on what the recent postponement of the Littoral Combat Ship downselect and what frequent criticisms of the program might mean for the future of the U.S. Naval force, it helps to look at some of the figures--numbers of ships, yearly shipbuilding goals, etc.--that the Navy is projecting in its five and thirty-year shipbuilding plans..

A great analysis of the many budgetary factors the Navy must consider as it moves forward with the LCS program was published in the latest issue of the Naval War College Review. Ronald O’Rourke writes that while trying to hammer out a schedule to begin the big build of the expected 55 LCS hulls it wants, the Navy must first grapple with its FY 2011–FY 2015 shipbuilding plan that calls for fifty ships of various classes to be built -- an average of ten per year. O’Rourke charges that this does not “necessarily mean that the service has solved its long-term challenge of shipbuilding affordability.”

The Navy was able to fund this fifty-ship plan in part because twenty-five of those ships—half the total —are relatively inexpensive LCSs and JHSVs [Joint High Speed Vessel]. Since LCSs and JHSVs are to account eventually for about 25 percent of the Navy’s planned 313-ship fleet, they are temporarily overrepresented in the Navy’s shipbuilding plan

O’Rourke crunches the numbers and finds that over the lifespan of the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan, even if its shipbuilding requests are met, the Navy is currently projecting that it will face “significant shortfalls” in the numbers of attack submarines and cruisers/destroyers--even as the sustainment costs rise significantly. What’s more, after FY15 when the Navy builds less LCS’ and JHSV’s, it will start building a planned twelve replacement ballistic-missile submarines, which at $6-$7 billion a pop, which is equivalent to almost half of the service’s annual budget for new ship construction. In other words, something is going to have to give.

There are a host of things that the Navy and the Pentagon can do, of course, to try and rectify this growing budgetary problem, including increasing the Navy’s budget in real terms; identifying more cost-cutting measures; extending the service lives of ships in the current fleet; relying more on less expensive unmanned platforms; and of course, make a concerted effort to train local coast guards and navies around the world to take more of a role in patrolling off their own coasts, lessening the burden on the U.S. fleets.

A few of these options, we all know, just aren’t going to happen. Given the constrained economic environment the United States--and the rest of the world--currently faces (England and France are sharing aircraft carriers!) defense budgets are only going to tighten. Add to that the fact that we have a Secretary of Defense who projects his intentions by asking a roomful of naval officers “whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 [billion] to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers,” and the budget question is effectively settled.

So, what to do? One of the options mentioned above--partnering with and training allies to share some of the maritime security mission--is a task that many in the Navy see as essential to ensuring the continued flow of goods across vital sea lanes that feed the “just-in-time” economic model that today’s industrialized nations operate under.

In the same issue the Naval Review, Admiral James Stavridis, head of the US European Command, and Lt. Cdr. Richard E. LeBron, explicitly call for more naval partnerships across the globe to help protect sea lanes. They single out NATO’s Operation OCEAN SHIELD, the EU’s Operation ATALANTA, and Combined Task Force 151—all supporting international efforts to combat piracy off the Horn of Africa—as excellent examples of successful collaborative, international, efforts at sea security. While the numbers of ships involved in each operation might be relatively small, “even more valuable would be increased inputs from overhead satellites and greater deployment of maritime patrol aircraft and long-range surveillance assets.” The U.S. Navy, of course, has started to push hard in the unmanned arena, as have the Europeans, as my colleague Andy Nativi reported yesterday.

When it comes to partnership, the U.S. Navy has been running its Africa Partnership Stations for several years now, where it trains local coast guards and naval forces in best practices for securing their own coastlines, but Stavridis and LeBron point to several NATO program that are bolstering “close cooperation and exchange of information related to antipiracy efforts between various players within NATO and between NATO, the EU, the UN, the African Union, and the Arab League,” and call for commercial ships to be added to this network for increased situational awareness on the high seas, since there are more commercial ships than military vessels operating at any given time.

Sticking with the theme of partnership and how it lessens the ultimate load that the U.S. Navy must bear around the globe is a piece by Coast Guard Cmdr. Sean Schenk in the Sept. issue of Proceedings. Highlighting U.S.-sponsored regional training centers, Schenk complains that the multiple, well-intentioned Navy and Coast Guard training, exercise, and equipment transfer programs to partner nations “are often compromised by insufficient follow-though,” and that plans “rarely look past the day” equipment arrives or an exercise winds up, and “comprehensive needs assessments for countries and regions are either lacking or not coordinated among government agencies.”

Sounds familiar, no?

Schenk’s solution is much the same as the one Stavridis and LeBron proposed: partner with regional and international organizations to assist in these missions. He points to several successful training programs in Malta and Kenya as evidence that with the proper guidance, funding, and long-term vision, local forces can provide some level of safety along their own coasts. While this alone won’t solve the Navy’s budgetary headaches, it is a vision for the future that more and more naval officers seem to be embracing.

More Bad News for the LCS

Just a week after the Navy announced that it had pushed its contract award date for the Littoral Combat Ship back yet again, only committing to make its decision between the competing Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics hulls “as expeditiously as practicable,” the Government Accountability Office has come out with a highly critical report that raises some serious questions about the next two hulls that the bidders are currently building.

The report says that while the first two hulls in the water--Lockheed’s USS Freedom and General Dynamics’ USS Independence--have identified a number of problems to be addressed in future builds, “challenges may hinder the ability of shipbuilders to apply lessons learned to follow-on ships and could undermine anticipated benefits from recent capital investments in the LCS shipyards.”

Technical issues with the first two seaframes have yet to be fully resolved. Addressing these technical issues has required the Navy to implement design changes at the same time LCS 3 and LCS 4 are being built. Incorporating changes during this phase will likely require additional labor hours beyond current forecasts.

Seeing as the Navy plans to invest over $25 billion through fiscal year 2035 to acquire 55 of the small, nimble ships, every delay serioulsy hampers the sea services’ ability to meet its own goal for growing the fleet.

Lockheed Martin’s Paul Lemmo told me back in May that when the USS Freedom (LCS1) was put in the water, the vessel was only about 60 percent complete. By time the company’s second vessel of the same class, the USS Fort Worth (LCS 3) hits the water in 2012, it will be about 85 percent complete. “We’ve been able to bring down the cost” on the production of LCS3 over LCS1, he added, “though the learning curve, and high levels of pre-outfitting, etc…LCS1 had a lot of concurrency in it, we were still finishing the design while we were building the ship—that doesn’t allow you to get all the equipment in the ship before you launch,” which then drives up the price of outfitting the ship while it is in the water.

Let’s not forget, however, that back in 2004 the Navy said that the cost of each LCS should be about $220 million—and as of 2009, the Freedom’s price tag had ballooned to $637 million and the Independence, or LCS 2, eventually came in at over $700 million.

The GAO goes on to say that "although the Navy has emphasized the importance of affordability to successful outcomes in the LCS program, it continues to make key investment decisions without a clear understanding of program costs," and criticized the Navy for lacking comprehensive cost estimates and an independent review. The report also detailed ongoing problems with the ships’ modular mission packages, concluding that "until mission packages are proven, the Navy risks investing in a fleet of ships that does not deliver promised capability."

Navy Investing in Long-Endurance Unmanned Assets

Aviation Week’s Amy Butler has a great piece this morning about a speech the U.S. Navy's Commander of Naval Operations Gary Roughead gave yesterday in Denver, in which he decried a “capabilities gap” in the Navy’s unmanned air and sea assets--while promising to do something about it.

There has been some action as of late in the Navy’s attitude toward unmanned assets. Back in July, AvWeek’s Bettina Chavanne reported that the Navy unveiled it’s brand-new unmanned maritime vehicle (UMV) office, which was designed to bring together traditional acquisition activities and advanced development n a single shop. Program manager Capt. Duane Ashton described the office’s function as being “to coordinate [unmanned vehicle acquisition] efforts and then direct specific experimentation and technology maturation.” The Navy hasn’t updated its official public doctrine on unmanned sea assets since 2004 when it released its Master UUV Plan, although word is that a revised document is due later this year.

As for Roughead’s talk, Amy reports that while Roughead said that UUVs are “potential game-changers” in how the Navy conducts its operations, there is no talk of untethering them from the fleet, meaning that they will still require links to nearby Navy assets. “We do not have the luxury, even if we have the desire,” for unmanned systems to operate independently, Roughead said. But then the Adm. dropped his big announcement:

In the Navy’s Fiscal 2012 budget proposal sent to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Roughead says he wants to spend about 50% of available UUV research and development money on improving their endurance. Ultimately, he would like to see 3-4 weeks of endurance and reserve power for some higher-speed maneuvers and to handle strong underwater currents.
       
Once the power problem is solved, Roughead says he wants to tackle how to bring UUV into a larger Navy information network despite their ability to travel vast distances on missions.
       
Also in the 2012 budget proposal, Roughead says he is planning to “enhance and restore electronic warfare dominance,” for the military. This mission area has suffered from wavering support from the Air Force and Navy. He also says he plans to push for restoring the information dominance expertise required to be successful in today’s fights.

Now we wait for the updated UUV strategy to be released so we can see just how far the Navy plans on taking this idea.

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Gates Cuts, Congress Pushes Back

Michael Bruno and I have some initial thoughts on Secretary Gates' big announcement yesterday of some pretty radical spending and staffing cuts at the DoD, and the Congressional pushback that has already started. Things have the potential to get very messy once Congress returns from its August break.

Traditional weapons programs like shipbuilding and emerging capabilities like cyberwarfare may be beneficiaries of the one-third, three-year cut in services support contracting that U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates outlined Aug. 9.

The steps announced were at once sweeping and seemingly nibbling, but all will be up for what promises to be a contentious congressional review in the Fiscal 2012 budget process.

Still, service contractors certainly will see strong headwinds as Gates, in a high-profile Pentagon press conference, said nascent insourcing efforts were not going far enough and that the way to cut excessive contracting costs was to root out offices and practices that generated them.

“To be clear, the task before us is not to reduce the department’s top-line budget,” he said. “Rather, it is to significantly reduce its excess overhead costs and apply the savings to force structure and modernization.”

Gates asserted to reporters that he was “determined” to change the way the Pentagon did business, and he said he would be staying longer than he or others once predicted. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, announced his support for the moves.

Several lawmakers, however, erupted in opposition. In particular, the Virginia delegation and governor announced a “united front” to fight the closure of U.S. Joint Forces Command (Jfcom), as Gates is recommending, and questioned whether Washington really would allow greater investments in areas like shipbuilding.

You can read the whole thing here.