By Geoff Fein
While there has been much speculation over how many more DDG-51s the Navy might ask for in its new path forward for surface combatants, a top Raytheon [RTN] official notes the program of record still calls for seven DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class ships to be built.
“Let’s begin in the beginning. The plan of record, currently unchanged by any budget process or testimony before Congress, is for seven DDG-1000s. That is the approved plan of record by the Navy, by the JROC (Joint Requirements Oversight Council), by OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) and by Congress,” Dan Smith, Raytheon president for Integrated Defense Systems division, told Defense Daily yesterday. “That is what Raytheon laid its plans upon.”
The current plan calls for building three DDG-1000s. Contracts for construction of two of the combat ships were issued earlier this year to General Dynamics‘ [GD] Bath Iron Works (BIW) and to Northrop Grumman [NOC]. A contract for the third ship has not been awarded.
The Navy had hoped to limit DDG-1000 production to two ships and take funding for the third Zumwalt and apply it to buying DDG-51s. But the Navy determined it would be too difficult to make that change this late in the FY ’09 budget process, a source told Defense Daily.
“We all know to build seven ships takes a few years, so there is plenty of opportunity for things to change in that process,” Smith said. “So we plan in basically five-year cycles….just like any other company. It takes about five years to build a ship, so the cycles and the numbers match up pretty well from a stability of workforce planning.”
Had the Navy only built two Zumwalts, Smith said, Raytheon would still have work out to 2012, 2013. “If they build three, that will extend that time period at least a year,” he added.
The Total Ship Computing Environment (TSCE), Dual Band Radar (DBR), and all of the Engineering Development Model (EDM) of the Zumwalt development process will, of course, be more mature than they were before, Smith said. “Therefore, [they would be] less risky to produce and less costly to produce because we will have produced more of them. That’s just an economies of scale discussion.”
“Right now, assuming that Congress goes along with the plan of record, which is to approve in FY ’09 the third DDG-1000, I would say it makes our plan good for the next five- year plan cycle,” he added.
Those EDMs, Smith noted, were developed in an open architecture modular way so that they could be forward fit and back fit to create from the mission equipment level, “a commonality and, therefore, an affordability across the fleet that we have never been able to achieve.”
“We have done numerous technical studies on behalf of the Navy to look at the cost and schedule and technical aspects, and ramifications and capability upgrades and what not, that are created by going down the family of ship strategy,” Smith said. “These things are built to be scalable, so the electronics could go and be scaled back in terms of physical size and functionality to something like LCS (Littoral Combat Ship) or be scaled all the way up to something like an aircraft carrier. That’s the beauty of the open architecture that was designed in the TSCE equipment space.”
DDG-1000 is being developed using Raytheon’s computer operating system, known as the Total Ship Computing Environment Infrastructure (TSCEI). The system runs on the company’s TSCE.
“The systems bring an open modular system that is scalable and is non-proprietary…the government owns the software, not like the Aegis system. You can, in fact, hold competitions. That’s what we do on Zumwalt, down to the algorithm level without breaking the system,” Smith explained.
Lockheed Martin [LMT] builds the Aegis combat system.
“If you were to check some of the activity going on in Navy contracts you find that there’s like five sole-sourced awards that have been advertised in Commerce Business Daily to Lockheed for Aegis over the last six to eight weeks. That’s driven by the facts the data is proprietary, the rights are declared…you have that kind of stuff still going on. You have a sole-source vendor therefore you pay the price.”
He points out that that’s not how Zumwalt, from its very beginning, was intended to be. When it was SC-21, DD(X) and all the predecessor programs, Smith said, DDG-1000 was intended to be open to allow it to be sourced differently in the future.
When it comes to Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Smith points out that even the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are not built BMD capable.
“There isn’t a DDG-51 today that comes off of the production ways with BMD capability, for example. That’s an upgrade to existing DDG-51s,” he said. “When they get through the next phase of that…I think the Navy plan is to have like 15 destroyers which have what you would call rudimentary BMD, but those are upgrades, as opposed to a standard package coming off the production way. So there is some knowledge there that needs to be looked at with a little bit finer tooth comb.”
And to do BMD a ship is going to need sensors, Smith added. “There really is no comparisons in capability between a DBR and a SPY-1D, either from a concurrency perspective…in other words how many phases can be in operation and how many modes at one time…or in just the capability to command the missile which is in the other end of the spectrum in the SM-3 (Standard Missile) mode.”
Even if the Navy’s proposal is approved and they go back to building DDG-51s, there is still opportunity for Raytheon, Smith added. “There is nothing that says you couldn’t make the non-recurring investment to put much of Zumwalt into a new construction DDG-51 hull, that’s what it was designed to do.”
Returning to DDG-51 could also pose an issue for the Navy’s efforts to incorporate to open architecture, he added.
“I think there is no question that if the Navy were to go back and build DDG-51s and if the Navy used Aegis [and] built them as a replica [of DDG-] 112, in other words [DDG- ]113 was [DDG-]112 redone, then we will set back open architecture, and we will set back achieving the goals that were put in place in the last 10 years to try and achieve affordability in the lifecycle as well as modularity for capability upgrades without expensive non-recurring costs in the future,” Smith said.