By Geoff Fein
The Navy is continuing to look at ways to neck down the number of common ship parts and components as well as define hull forms that could be used for a number of different platforms, a top Navy official said.
“There is a lot of effort where we are trying to address this issue of commonality, really trying to come at it from two points,” Rear Adm. William Landay, program executive officer (PEO) ships, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
Many of those efforts are being led by Naval Sea (NAVSEA) Systems 05– Ship Design, Integration and Engineering are led by Rear Adm. Thomas Eccles, Landay noted.
“They are looking at systems, valves, components, a lot of the stuff Vice Adm. Paul Sullivan (former commander NAVSEA) used to talk about and trying to cull through,” Landay said.
“We have a concept called a shelf, where they are looking at a small subset of systems or components that they believe give you the widest range of capability,” he added.
Those parts could be pulled from the shelf for use, Landay said.
So now when a ship designer, whether Navy or industry, is working on a program for Landay, and is in need of a component, they are going to be told it must come from the shelf, “unless either what is on the shelf doesn’t work or you can make a compelling reason why what you’re proposal does really adds value,” Landay added.
“In almost all cases, the ‘adding value’ is going to be from a total ownership cost perspective,'” he said. “Just because it gives you more capability may no longer be a reason to go do something new.”
Problems could arise, however, at the shipbuilder level, where they have developed relationships with individual suppliers, and may be reluctant to end them.
Landay doesn’t see that becoming a problem.
“In most of these cases, we are still going to go through the shipyards to buy parts. So, from their perspective, just as we do now, we say here’s an acceptable set of parts, you go buy from one of those. It will just be kind of a smaller set we ask them to [buy] from,” he said. “And, hopefully the intent will be more commonality so maintenance procedures are the same, training gets reduced, and you have less variation and maybe at some point you get volume discounts because you are buying more of a smaller set of components.”
Landay added that what the Navy is trying to do is “walk that fine line of–you don’t want one, you don’t want to sole source to somebody, you want to keep enough variation in there that you have innovation, that you’ve got companies interested in bringing new ideas to the Navy.”
“Now we are trying to say let’s keep that list to a relatively small, good wide range, that covers a broad spectrum to allow you to pick what you really need for your application,” he said. “That’s the approach at the system level.”
Within PEO Ships, and in conjunction with the discussions going on with NAVSEA 05, officials are also looking at the commonality issue from the ship level, Landay said.
“If you look today at our programs of record we have a number of ship classes that look to be pretty flexible–the LPD-17 hull form and HM&E (hull, mechanical and electrical)…it’s a good platform…it has a lot of volume,” he said. “T-AKE…it doesn’t have all of the warship survivability but it seems to be a pretty flexible platform. DDG-51, DDG-1000…those two combination are a logical base for any next generation surface combatant between the two of those or some combination of the two of those.”
As the Navy starts thinking about forward design, instead of thinking “here’s what we want, figure out how to design that,” what the service is trying to do is take an approach that says “here’s what we got, and let’s figure out how we can use it, and if we can’t get everything we want in it let’s pause and understand what you may not be able to get in it before you just automatically kind of go off with a new clean ship design,” Landay said.
“It’s just a different approach. It’s not unlike what we tend to do in an analysis of alternatives (AoA), but the AoA often times will tend to start with the new design and see what else might be able to work,” he added. “Here we are trying to say, ‘let’s figure out what we’ve already got and how we can fit it in there. And if that doesn’t meet our requirements, what additional design might be in that?'”