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Sunday, June 5, 2005

Navy offers new strategy for building destroyers


By MATT WICKENHEISER, Portland Press Herald Writer

Copyright © 2005 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
The next-generation Navy destroyer hasn't even been built yet, but it already has been adrift for months on a stormy sea.

Plans for the program - which is crucial to the future of Maine's largest manufacturing company - have taken radical turns as the Navy and Congress pushed their respective agendas.

The Navy called for major changes to the procurement process, and Congress blocked that effort. A Senate committee added millions of dollars to the DD(X) program while the House counterpart cut more than a billion.

Now, a new Navy proposal could calm the waters for DD(X), at least for the next few years. The Navy suggests having two shipyards build the first new destroyers simultaneously.

It's an idea the Navy hopes will bring down costs while keeping the two destroyer shipyards, Bath Iron Works and Northrop Grumman's Ingalls Shipyard, working on the DD(X) until at least 2009. Some members of Maine's congressional delegation are cautious about the proposal but don't seem as vehemently opposed to it as they were to an earlier Navy plan. And defense analysts say that it goes a long way toward meeting the needs of all parties.

"The thing this does is near-term, it placates (Congress). Both yards are working," said Jay Korman, an analyst with DFI International, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm. "The key (question) is what happens beyond that."

The tug of war over destroyers began in February, when the Navy announced plans for a dramatic change to the DD(X) program. Instead of having Ingalls build the lead ship, with BIW constructing the second, the Navy wanted to create a winner-take-all competition between the yards. One would build all the destroyers.

Congress blocked the proposal, noting that the plan could either kill the much-smaller BIW or seriously hurt Ingalls. The action seemed to be good news for BIW, which would have been fine if it had won the competition but financially devastated had it lost.

The Navy, however, hasn't given up the idea of a competition for the DD(X), as evidenced by its latest proposal.

In late May, the Navy proposed that both Ingalls and BIW build a lead ship for the DD(X) program, to be budgeted for 2007.

"I want to put these two yards in a competitive death grip so they will work to make U.S. shipbuilding more competitive, they will work cooperatively on the side and the Navy will get a great design that can affordably be built," said Assistant Secretary of the Navy John J. Young Jr. in a May 25 press briefing.

If both yards build a DD(X) that meets the Navy's needs and is cost-effective, then it might be feasible to have them both working on the ships in the future. It's another story if one yard produces a clearly superior ship at a greater cost savings.

"All I'm saying is we set the stage to make a very good, very informed decision in '09 because the design will be virtually complete and I'll have significant returns from both years," said Young. "So that can be a valid basis for deciding who gets the (next) ship; a valid basis for providing data that says we (have to go to one yard), or validates us to say we can proceed with two yards and affordably control our costs."



No Military Value? Are They Kidding?


By JAMES H. PATTON JR.
Published on 6/5/2005

I've reading in the media that the Navy put Submarine Base New London on the base closure list because it had little military value. Many other reasons could have been believable — a Red state/Blue state rationale, an (ill-advised) “consolidation” of naval assets in Norfolk Virginia, or even the final round of the rumored running feud before Adm. Vern Clark, the Chief of Naval Operations, and retired Adm. Frank L. “Skip” Bowman, the recently retired head of Naval Reactors.

But little military value? They've got to be kidding.

If there is an alleged reason to better support “The Global War on Terrorism,” lets look at some numbers. In the early 1980s, when a pressing need first arose to scramble an attack submarine to the Persian Gulf, I was running the Advanced Tactics Department at the Submarine School and got involved in the preparations.

Counterintuitively, it made hardly any difference from which East Coast port the ship sailed — it was just about 8,000 miles to the Cape of Good Hope and a total of 13,500 to the Straits of Hormuz. Via Gibraltar, a New London deployer would travel 400 miles less than a ship leaving Norfolk, Va., and 1,000 miles less than a ship leaving Kings Bay, Ga. Needless to say, it was a submarine from Groton (in fact, the USS Groton) that was selected for this first-of-a-kind mission.

If an urgent “swing” of East Coast forces to the western Pacific would be required, the under-ice route is preferable (during the last year two East Coast submarines took this route during the course of a routine 6-month deployment), and the trip would be about 11,000 miles to the vicinity of Taiwan. From Kings Bay, it would be about 12,300 miles regardless of whether the trip was via the Arctic Ocean or the Panama Canal.

If one takes a rough value of about 500 miles a day as a reasonable rapid transit speed, then current “areas of interest” lie two to three days farther from Kings Bay than from New London. Double these numbers for mission days lost on a round-trip basis. Oh, and by the way, look at a map – Kings Bay is about 20 miles from Jacksonville, Fla. (yes Virginia, that Florida! Georgia doesn't own the metropolitan area that really is the big economic winner in this switch).

Now consider the long versus short-term naval strategy. A marvelous generalization can be made that any military thing is analogous to either infantry, artillery or cavalry. Simplistically, infantry and artillery come as a matched set – soldiers to protect the guns and guns to protect the soldiers. However, since cavalry can engage and disengage at will, operate without a lot of support and move quickly, they are capable of pretty much operating by themselves when appropriate. In a naval sense, it takes no rocket scientist to picture carriers as artillery, destroyers and cruisers as infantry, and submarines as cavalry.

An enduring role for cavalry is to “protect the flanks,” and make no mistake about it, regardless of how long this Global War on Terror lasts, the North Atlantic will remain a flank. The continuing concern about a resurgent and expansionist Russia (arguably the producers of the world's second-best attack submarine, the Severodvinsk) is best dealt with by not retracting from a forward-positioned flank. Groton is one day closer to the Northern tip of Norway than Norfolk, and two days closer than from Kings Bay.

I just returned from a “Future Naval Plans and Requirements” conference in London, and quite frankly, our NATO allies seemed concerned about our pulling back from the North Atlantic. Great Britain is not building to the attack submarine force levels required to replace our presence there, and many of the Baltic and North Sea countries have shifted their naval structure to one best suited for “Expeditionary Operations” in support of the Global War on Terror under the assumption that what did exist as an East/West balance of power made their regional defensive structure redundant.

The environmental card

One last point. I had also read that environmental contamination clean-up costs were not heavily weighted in the Defense Department base closure process because all bases have their unique pollution problems, and in the last analysis, it would all be a wash.

This rationale is almost true to a degree, but for one very significant exception, as the newest of all the submarine bases (and perhaps of major military installations in general), Kings Bay was built and operated in a strict “post-OSHA” environment. In spite of the best efforts of the submarine force to “stay ahead” of environmental issues, exemplified by Naval Reactors' total ban in the early 1960s on any inshore discharge of primary reactor coolant, the Groton Submarine Base is simply a much older industrial facility with significantly more accumulated cleanup problems. After a day of picking up loose gum wrappers and McDonald's cups, the keys to Kings Bay could be tossed to local authorities as the Navy leaves.

James H. Patton Jr. is a retired Navy captain, a submariner, and president of Submarine Tactics and Technology in North Stonington.

Jun. 5, 2005 20:59 | Updated Jun. 5, 2005 22:21
Mystery sub was spying for the US
By ARIEH O'SULLIVAN

The mystery submarine that Israel detected snooping off its shores last November belonged to the American navy and was on a spy mission, Channel Two reported Sunday.

According to the unattributed report, Israeli officials have not indicated what the Americans may have been looking for.

Military officials declined to comment on the report. Senior military sources have only said that it belonged to a "Western navy."

The incident occurred on the night of November 9 off the northern coast of Israel. The Navy had detected the submarine after it had penetrated two nautical miles into Israel's territorial waters, about 18 kilometers from shore.

The Navy followed the submarine for a few hours, but the moment it took active measures to close in on the submarine, it quickly turn and headed back to international waters.

MK (Likud) Yuval Steinitz, head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee hinted at the time of American involvement when he warned if Israel had attacked the sub "dozens of American or French sailors would have died unnecessarily."

Following the incident, reports surfaced late last year that the United States had increased its intelligence operations against Israel as part of an effort to prevent escalation of the conflict with the Palestinians with an invasion of the Gaza Strip following incessant Kassam rocket strikes, or offensive action against Hizbullah in Lebanon or even Syria.

The reports said the United States had increased U.S. satellite monitoring of Israel to determine military movements, import and export of weapons and weapons tests. They also said the Americans had expanded the interception of signals communications from Israeli government and military facilities.

Franco Lolan

Sub caught after only in 2 miles. Doesn't sound positive.