By Geoff Fein
The perceived lack of a imminent threat, along with dwindling budgets and shrinking industrial base, are having a significant impact on the development of undersea warfare systems, according to a National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) study.
“The USW (undersea warfare) industry faced the same reduction that the defense industry experienced over the past few decades. Without a perceived and compelling threat, there has been insufficient rationale to support major acquisition programs; rather, the trend has been to fix, modernize, sustain, and pace the threat,” the study said.
The association recommended a greater role for its Undersea Warfare Division (UWD) that includes ensuring compliance with government regulations and enabling firsthand dialogue, information sharing, and access to capability assessments of both the operational tools and industrial base, NDIA said.
According to the report published this past fall, “industry capability in USW has struggled to sustain necessary resources to support this warfare area; however, it has not been investing in breakthrough technology.”
The Navy has relied more on spiral/incremental development efforts for technologies that fit budget constrained programs “with the highest demand signal from immediate threats,” as opposed to taking a “step-function” approach to improving capability to widen the margin against diesel submarines and advanced mines, the report notes.
While the Navy’s reliance on open architecture and commercial-off-the-shelf components has achieved gains in signal and data processing for incremental investment, those efforts have also “caused a migration of the industry away from some of the key enablers and into a modernization and sustainment role,” NDIA said.
The trend has allowed the government to assume systems engineering and integration work previously done by industry, the report added.
“Combined with a flat or declining budget scenario, USW capability is asymptotically approaching mediocrity,” the study said.
“The State of the Undersea Warfare Industrial Base” report also noted that USW suffers from the belief that the nation lacks an “imminent and credible threat, causing resource sponsors and program managers to focus on sustainment and incremental capability insertion.”
That approach is also impacting the talent pool needed to develop USW technologies and applications, the report added.
The impact of this approach has moved the Navy away from “pacing the threat,” to “chasing the threat,” NDIA said.
While the report credits the work the Navy has done in moving USW requirements into research and development, and acquisition, “there is still a gap between conducting R&D and transitioning that work into acquisition programs.”
Additionally, while the USW effort involves players from across the surface, undersea and air domains, “there is not a systematic process to balance or leverage capability, particularly sensors and weapons, across the playing field,” the study added.
USW development has also been impacted not only by industry consolidation, but by declining budgets competing with the Navy’s funding realities as well a wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the study noted.
“Although many flag officers and senior executive service leaders have made public statements about the priority and need for increased investment in USW, they have not materialized in the budget, where the procurement accounts are projecting further declines.,” the report said. “This is not a new phenomenon, since the Navy has a long history of stretching and/or canceling major USW programs before the delivery of the first article.”
Changing this trend will take several program objective memorandum cycles, NDIA added.
USW research and development should focus toward “affordable capability, which can transition to feasible, producible, operable and deployable systems,” the study said.
“Much of science and technology does not have a clear transition path and it either does not transition or stays in the science and technology environment longer than it should eating up more precious USW funding,” according to the report. “There isn’t a clear path to show the linkage in funded programs to take leading edge thinking into investment tied to a program and schedule to deliver capability. The diesel-electric and littoral threats are not drawing top priority, so our allies’ research and development efforts follow the Navy’s (lack of) investment strategy.”
Industry can help by providing an early input to research and development program decisions by performing a “sanity check” on what can transition to production with acceptable risk based on the requirements and the results of the research and development phase,” the report added.
The availability of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software has also changed the way the Navy does business, the report said.
“Tech insertion and modernization programs have made significant performance improvements to legacy systems. The initial cost to provide these performance improvements has resulted in system procurement costs that are significantly lower than the cost of the legacy systems which are being replaced,” NDIA said. “While we are able to provide this improved performance at lower cost we must not become complacent. These COTS technology advances are available to any country intent on improving their warfighting capability and we must continually improve our own performance in order to stay ahead of any threats.”
Maintaining COTS based systems is also much different than the approach used on legacy systems, the report noted.
“COTS hardware is not supported by commercial industry for more than a few years as it is constantly being replaced by more powerful and smaller footprint hardware. This requires that we must plan to replace the hardware in our combat systems on a regular basis.,” the report said. “Purchasing a large number of spare parts is no longer a valid maintenance approach as many of these parts will not be used before they become obsolete. With regard to non-COTS system elements, support costs are borne by a relatively small industrial base and government infrastructure, perhaps giving the appearance that these systems are costly to support.”
The OA/COTS model also impacts the industrial base for sustainment. Buying large numbers of spare parts is no longer viable because many of the electronic assemblies become obsolete before the spare is needed, the report said.
“When these logistic support roles are distributed across an industry wider than the USW base, the net effect is a further dilution of resource and investment available for sensor and weapon technology,” the report said. “Sensor and weapon technology is tightly coupled to platforms and only loosely linked to the electronics systems. Although the Navy is fielding new ships, aircraft, submarines, and autonomous vehicles, there has been little research and development to take advantage of the efficiencies from the gains in power reduction and miniaturization of the electronics.”
For example, instead of conceiving a torpedo that would benefit from a wide range of industrial development, an incremental improvement effort is focused almost exclusively on the electronics in the sensing package, the report added. “Similarly, we are embarking on a high altitude aviation USW capability without an equivalent investment in the sensors and weapons to conduct the mission in a new paradigm.”
Pacing the threat is not an acceptable option either, the report added. “These threats can quickly catch up and outpace us if we let them. We cannot proceed with ‘business as usual’ where we are taking advantage of emerging technology in small pieces to lower the budget without applying some of the leverage to future investment.”
Another significant issue is that several critical USW technologies do not derive from commercial products. Transducers, telemetry, spatial/spectral signal conditioning, underwater sensors, weapons, and special communications have limited consumer or industrial application, the report said.
“In many of today’s USW systems, contemporary electronics are connected to geriatric sensors and weapons. If the industrial base for these components is not self-sustaining at a critical mass through government funded programs, then it will atrophy rapidly and perhaps be unable to reconstitute without years of gapped capability,” according to the study.
NDIA recommended the Navy take several steps to bring industry in as a contributor and/or facilitator in parallel with the service’s plans.
Among those ideas outlined by NDIA are:
- Assign NDIA’s Undersea Warfare Division (UWD) Navy Liaison Officer to the Navy USW Cross Functional Board to enhance the industrial base perspective of this team. Also empower and authorize this representative to share relevant information with the UWD leadership. UWD roundtable events could be used as a forum to ensure compliance with government regulations.
- Formalize the UWD relationship with Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command to enable firsthand dialogue, information sharing, and access to capability assessments of both the operational tools and industrial base.
- Consider expanding the UWD role to include relationships with principal allied stakeholders and complementary non-US based USW technology providers; this would require processes and procedures that might be similar to those used in current industry dealings with the export of technical data (e.g., data licenses or technical assist agreements).
- Promote scholarships & incentives for students in technical college degrees to broaden the seeds of interest in USW studies.
- Utilize the flexibility incorporated in the National Security Personnel System to recruit/retain USW expertise (e.g. form a “Community of Interest or Practice” or make strategic decisions in government technical or acquisition positions to raise the visibility and enhance the talent pool).
“The NDIA UWD is in a unique position to support building a Navy/Industry team approach to ensuring superiority in undersea warfare. This team should have as its goal the creation of a 21st Century USW industrial base structure and government/industry interfaces,” the report said. “Both the government and industry must work together, and be structured to preserve and grow critical USW skill sets and capacity in the long term.