By Geoff Fein
With the completion of advanced capability build (ACB) 08 on the USS Bunker Hill (CG-52), Navy officials are now turning their attention to follow-on ACBs to begin opening up and competing combat system components to add new capabilities to the fleet quicker and for less cost.
Although the Navy’s plan had been to begin introducing open architecture (OA) into the fleet in 2008, the Bunker Hill’s completion of Combat System Ship Qualification Trials (CSSQT) in July, nonetheless, marked a significant milestone in the effort to separate the combat system hardware from software (Defense Daily, Aug. 5).
“That is a huge open architecture success story,” Capt. Terry Mosher, combat systems integration branch head, told Defense Daily recently.
“It doesn’t have as many of the open architecture accomplishments as ACB 12 and beyond will have achieved, but it is a necessary foundational step to prepare us for ACB 12 and beyond,” he added.
The Bunker Hill is performing “superbly,” Mosher noted.
By incorporating new systems such as the Standard Missile (SM) 2 Block IV, Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC), the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM), the Close-In-Weapon System (CWIS) 1B, and new gun systems, the Navy has taken the oldest Aegis ship (the Bunker Hill was commissioned on Sept. 20, 1986) and given her comparable capability to the DDG-51s that are just now coming off the production line, Mosher said.
“That’s a huge success story. That’s a good indicator of how we are going to do with ACB 12 and beyond,” he said. “ACB 08 is at sea performing as expected, on schedule.”
Lockheed Martin [LMT] makes the Aegis combat system.
Raytheon [RTN] makes the Standard Missile, ESSM, and CWIS.
ACB 12 development is on schedule, Mosher added. “It is a more robust challenge than ACB 08 was.”
The Navy’s plan is to deliver new software to the surface combatant fleet every two years, he said.
“It is a two-year fielding cycle not necessarily a two-year development cycle,” Mosher said. “So, we will likely have multiple ACBs in development simultaneously. We will have one that’s ready to field going out to the fleet. We will have one in mid development and one in early development. The development will certainly take longer than two years, especially initially.”
ACB 08 begins the OA Aegis modernization effort on the Navy’s cruisers. ACB 12 will mark the beginning of the modernization work for destroyers and follow-on cruisers, Mosher said.
The first couple of ACBs–’08 for the cruiser, ’12 for the destroyers and follow on cruisers–are pretty significant undertakings, he added. “And those have both been five- to six-year development efforts.”
“As we move to subsequent ACBs, we see the size of the ACBs getting smaller so they won’t be a four- to five-year development effort. They will probably be a two- to four-year development effort,” he said. “The way you can look at ACBs, there is an ACB bus leaving the station every two years. If you are a program looking to get on the bus…looking for an ACB to integrate into…and if you miss an ACB, OK fine. There will be another ACB leaving two years from now.”
The ACB process is a far superior model than the way the Navy used to bring new capabilities into the fleet, Mosher said. In the past, if a program manager was looking for a combat system to integrate a technology into and it missed some major programmatic milestone, it might be decades before another opportunity to get in to the next baseline comes up, he added.
“We will be fielding things faster, not necessarily developing them faster, especially as we get started in this,” Mosher said.
But what happens if a new threat arises in the middle of an ACB? Can the Navy integrate a new capability onto a ship between ACB years?
There are more opportunities to field capability faster in the ACB model then there were in the old baseline model, Mosher said.
“If we have a capability that needs to be fielded…if you have something that is relatively low order of magnitude, low order of difficulty to mature it and get it ready to field, then that two-year cycle is open for things to come in relatively late in the development cycle and field relatively quickly,” Mosher said.
Because there are going to be multiple ACBs in development at a single point in time, if a technology is relatively mature, for example, coming out of the Office of Naval Research or one of the Navy’s labs, and it is at a technical readiness level six or seven and ready to be fielded, there will be an opportunity to catch the next ACB, Mosher added.
“If you have an idea that is relatively immature and needs to be seasoned a bit and developed a bit more, you may shoot for an early integration into one of the ACBs that are already in development, but won’t field for five or six years,” he said.
In ACB 12, the Navy will further open up the combat systems. The service has already awarded competitive contracts for different parts of that combat system, Mosher said. “For the first time ever, we have open competition within the Aegis weapon system.”
Under ACB 12, the Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS), has taken the system track manager and the track server, what Mosher called “the heart of the combat system,” and ran an open competition, awarding General Dynamics [GD] Advanced Information Systems work on both systems. “So they are in the heart of the Aegis Weapon System,” Mosher said. The Navy’s acquisition community also ran open competitions for both the display systems and the processing system. The displays used to be a sole source provider as was the processor.
General Dynamics captured the competition for the common display system (CDS) and Virginia Beach-based Global Technical Systems (GTS) won the common processing system (CPS).
“Now, for the system track manager, CPS and CDS, the government has defined the requirement, the government has defined the design, the government has defined the interfaces, and with everyone of those the government, owns the interfaces and designs,” Mosher said. “Not only did we compete the development of it, but we are positioned to compete the production work of all of those [systems] in the future.”
For ACB 14, Mosher said the Navy expects to make even more progress.
“We expect to compete even more of the combat system. As we compete these combat systems, we get into a position where we can start merging Aegis and SSDS (Ship Self-Defense System) components and start getting away from what we think of now as Aegis-only solutions or SSDS [only-] solutions,” he added.
Raytheon makes SSDS.
Now, every time a system has a track manager or track server, the Navy won’t have to pay for them many times over, Mosher said.
“We, on the requirement, side recognize we shouldn’t have to pay for it over and over and over again. So let’s come up with an enterprise track manager and track server. We will pay the investment, and there is an investment to develop that enterprise component,” he said. “But the payoff is now we own the track manager and track server and we can in future competitions specify that that is the solution for the track manager and track server. So whoever wins that contract is free from having to go do that work again…it’s already done…it’s part of the progress we are showing for open architecture.”