The ideas varied from cheap arsenal ships designed to pack scores of missile cells capable of remote firing, to a larger version of the Arleigh Burke able to support more than its current 96 more missile tubes, to today’s push for an unmanned surface vessel that can act as an adjunct missile magazine accompanying the fleet and that can be rotated out as it expends its payloads.

But each of those solutions has encountered problems, and all the while the cruisers keep getting older, more worn and closer to the day when maintenance costs outweigh the vessels’ benefits.

As it gears up for its 2022 budget battle, the Navy has signaled it is time to move on and phase out the cruisers to make room for the next-generation Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, even if it means shrinking the fleet in the near term. The Flight III doesn’t solve the Navy’s missile problem, but it does have enough space onboard (it’s about 400 tons heavier than its Flight IIA counterparts) to house the air warfare command role that currently belongs to the cruisers.

Experts and observers who spoke to Defense News think it’s time for the Navy to cut its losses on cruisers but said the loss of the vertical launching system, or VLS, tubes is a significant concern, especially given the missile and anti-air threat in Indo-Pacific region.

The Navy had planned to keep 11 cruisers in the fleet for as long as possible to pair with the 11 aircraft carriers, but now the service is looking at phasing in the Flight III DDG as an alternative. A one-for-one swap of 11 destroyer for 11 cruisers is a net loss of more than 300 VLS cells.

But for the Navy, it is a matter of where its money is best spent. After years of battling Congress over the fate of its largest surface combatant, the Navy looks poised to fight for accelerating their decommissioning. The settlement with Congress created the current cruiser modernization program, but the Navy is again looking to change course.

In an emailed statement to Defense News, the Navy’s top requirements officer said there would be a new plan for the cruisers submitted with the fiscal 2022 budget, and that the escalating costs associated with keeping them is driving the conversation.

“Due to increased program cost, schedule delays, substantial growth work and challenges with shipyard execution, the Navy considered truncating the [cruiser modernization] program as part of a pre-decisional version of the 30-year shipbuilding plan drafted under the previous administration,” said Vice Adm. Jim Kilby, the deputy chief of naval operations for war-fighting requirements and capabilities. “These plans are under review by the current administration as part of broader discussions regarding the FY22 budget.”

The Navy’s plan going forward is to start phasing in the Flight III DDG as the primary air and missile defense command ships, along with the next-generation destroyer currently in development, Kilby said. The first Flight III, the Jack Lucas, is scheduled to begin entering the fleet in 2023, Kilby said.

Flight III was built around the Raytheon-developed AN/SPY-6 radar system, which is about 30 times more sensitive than the SPY-1 arrays on the Navy’s current cruisers and destroyers, but it requires much more power. That led to a significant redesign of the Flight IIA DDG.

Changing the deal

The Navy is currently executing what’s known as the 2-4-6 plan, a compromise hashed out between Congress and the Navy to keep at least 11 cruisers in the fleet to run shotgun on the air defense of the 11 carriers in the fleet through the 2030s.

The 2-4-6 plan calls for two ships at a time to be sidelined for no longer than four years, and that no more than six ships will be in this inactive status at one time. Today, the Navy has five ships in modernization, four of which have completed significant portions of the upgrades. Two of them are going through a difficult reactivation process to bring the ships back to the fleet in 2022, Kilby said.

The idea behind the 2-4-6 plan was to keep the class as the air and missile defense command ships of the fleet until the last cruiser, the Cape St. George, retired in 2038 after 40 years in active service.

In its 2021 budget submission, the Navy floated the idea of canceling six of the planned cruiser modernizations and starting to accelerate decommissioning the hulls.

The plan, as it was proposed to Congress, was to decommission the cruisers Bunker Hill, Mobile Bay, Antietam, Leyte Gulf, San Jacinto and Lake Champlain in 2021 and 2022, foregoing plans for service-life extensions that previously received support in Congress.

All the ships will be at or near the end of their 35-year service lives when they are decommissioned. But the same congressional objections still exist today that a few years ago birthed the Navy’s 2-4-6 plan. In March, House Armed Services Committee Vice Chair Elaine Luria, D-Va., said she is opposed to decommissioning older ships as the Navy tries to grow.

But with the new administration pushing for the divestiture of older systems to invest in new ones, the Navy is gearing up for a renewed debate on cruisers in 2022, the service’s top officer told a roundtable of reporters April 5.

“Does it make more sense to hang on with the cruises that are that are well past their 30-years service life, continue to pour millions of dollars into upkeeping those vessels, [while] the White House has directed that we divest of legacy and invest in new platforms?” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday asked. “For the Navy, we know that’s a distributed maritime operations concept that is driving a smaller, more distributed fleet [with fewer] large vessels, and more lethal, smaller vessel. That means frigates. So we should have that debate over whether we should put that next dollar into a 33-year-old cruiser, or whether we should invest in the Flight III DDG.

“We ought to have that debate because, in the end, hopefully what’s driving it are some of those attributes that I talked about before: lethality, survivability, operational reach, total ownership costs, maintenance requirements, technical risks, industrial-base capacity.”

The Navy is facing a VLS tube problem, however. Decommissioning the cruisers, along with other high-capacity VLS ships such as the Ohio-class guided missile submarines, means the Navy has fewer missile tubes coming into the fleet than it has leaving, a troubling trend in the light of China’s investments in anti-surface missiles.

A Defense News analysis from January found that if the Navy is on a course to decommission around 70 ships with nearly 5,500 VLS cells, replacing them with 65 ships and submarines that have anywhere from 1,800 to more than 2,000 fewer VLS cells by the early 2030s.

The VLS tube debate, while important, shouldn’t drive the whole discussion, Gilday said. “We can’t just be counting VLS tubes and satisfying ourselves that that’s the sole metric we’re going to look at.”

Buying new

The Navy would likely be better served buying new ships instead of throwing more money at cruisers, said Bryan Clark, a retired submariner and senior fellow with the Hudson Institute.

The reason is simple: Modernizing older ships is difficult because you never know what you are going to find when you start working on the ship. That means labor costs will almost certainly grow, making the job and the associated costs more difficult and less defined than would be the case with a newly purchased ship.

“With these service-life extensions, it’s open ended: You get inside of [it and] you don’t know what the work is going to be, and the materials may not be that expensive, but the labor is really expensive,” Clark said. “And then the dry dock time is really expensive.

“So it’s an open-ended process and the costs of being open-ended. It ends up that taking these older platforms and trying to extend their lives is oftentimes a more expensive, less valuable or less cost-effective option than simply buying a new thing to replace it.

“It’s not unreasonable to say: ‘Well, why don’t I spend $1.7 billion to get a ship that will last 40 years instead of upwards of $500 million to get a ship for 10?’ ”

But that is going to run into Congress’ effort to drive up the number of ships in the fleet, he added.

“I think the discussion is going to be: Are we willing to accept a slight reduction in the size of the fleet for a time because we’re going to let these ships leave until DDG numbers pick up? There’s an optics question there.”

WASHINGTON — As the U.S. Navy’s littoral combat ship program battles reliability problems, it is also wrestling another and potentially just as fearsome bear: operating costs.

The service’s top officer said the original concept for a minimal crewing model — where as few as 32 sailors and eight officers manned the ship, and much of the maintenance burden fell to contractors — has driven up costs.

The answer? Put sailors back in charge of more maintenance, which means the Navy might need to add even more sailors to the crew.

Indeed, the additional manning might serve as yet another driver of higher operating costs, but the current numbers indicate that expenses can’t get much worse.

Today, a littoral combat ship costs about $70 million annually to operate, according to a calculation of budget data obtained by Defense News. The Navy disputed this number, saying it is closer to $50 million. In comparison, the cost of operating an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer — a much more mature and established design program — runs around $81 million.

If the Navy can’t reign in those LCS costs, it would mean the Navy’s lightly armed, 3,400-ton small surface combatant designed for maximum operational availability will cost nearly as much to operate as its heavily armed, 9,400-ton large surface combatant.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday acknowledged the high cost of operating the ships, but said an internal push to drive more of the maintenance of the ships to sailors on the deckplates, and thus away from contractors, should help push down the cost of running the LCS.

“So if you snap the chalk line today, the costs are pretty high, especially compared to a [guided-missile destroyer] DDG” Gilday said. “But what we’re trying to do is move from a contractor-centric maintenance model to a sailor-centric maintenance model, or a Navy-centric maintenance model.”

Gilday said U.S. Fleet Forces Command, which is in charge of the Navy’s system that prepares ships ready for deployment, is trying to bring more naval maintenance in-house. But moving to that kind of a model may require more sailors, he admitted.

Since its introduction to the fleet, the littoral combat ship has gone from 40 assigned sailors and officers to 50; then in 2016, that grew to 70 sailors when the surface fleet decided to permanently assign each LCS with a single mission — either surface, mine or antisubmarine warfare. Now, to support more crew-centered maintenance, that number may have to grow again.

“That’ll be a significant cost savings if we get to that point,” Gilday said. “Of course, we have to take a look at: If we do that, do we have adequate numbers of people onboard the ship to be able to do that fully? If it needed to be a phased plan, how long it would take?

“I think [that] over time, if we get that piece right, if we get the supply parts piece right — having the right parts on the ship at the right time — I think we can probably get to a place where you see more efficiencies.”

Ultimately, it’s the Navy’s job to makes sure the United States gets its money’s worth out of the LCS, Gilday said.

“We do have a responsibility to try and make use of those ships and be the most efficient they can be,” he said. “I think we’re going to be learning for a little while as we shift to this new maintenance model and as we get more water under the keel of those hulls.”

What to do with LCS?

The service is also battling reliability issues, most notably with the combining gear on its Freedom-class littoral combat ship. The combining gear fuses and transmits power from four separate engines to the ship’s waterjet propulsion system.

Issues with the combining gear have led to a string of propulsion issues, putting the whole Freedom-class fleet under limitations on how it uses its propulsion plant.

In December, Defense News reported that the Navy was investigating a potential class-wide design flaw. In January, the Navy announced it was halting deliveries of the Freedom class until redesigned combining gear is installed.

Lead contractor Lockheed Martin and combining gear manufacturer RENK have identified a fix for the combining gear. According to Gilday, the Navy will begin testing it this month.

Gilday added that the LCS program is on track to deliver the long-delayed anti-submarine warfare and mine warfare mission packages in 2022 — essentially the sensors and weapons that help the ships carry out their original mission.

The yearslong delays with the mission packages have contributed to an increasingly tense relationship between Congress and the Navy over fielding new technologies.

“Our job as a Navy is deliver a lethal combatant and … my goal is 0.5 [operational availability],” Gilday said, referring to having the ship available for tasking 50 percent of the time. “But in order to get that 0.5 [availability], there’s a few things that we need to fix in order to get to that objective. The first is we need to get after reliability and sustainability issues. … The second piece is lethality.”

But some analysts and observers have raised the possibility of cutting losses on the littoral combat ship, to one degree or another, putting money into other projects that, first, might have more value in a high-end war with advanced competitors like China or Russia and, second, aren’t beset by manning, maintenance and reliability problems.

Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, has called for the Navy to lean heavily into forward-basing the ships in the Asia-Pacific region; specific locations include Sasebo, Japan; Bahrain; and Mayport, Florida. That would allow the Navy to centralize its maintenance infrastructure in a limited number of ports; save the ships from the wear and tear of cross-ocean transits; and reduce the number needed to operate by having them forward-deployed.

For the rest of the ships, Clark said, it may be time to think about retirement.

“We’d probably want to decommission or retire a good chunk of the early ones because if you are going to move towards a kind of centralized-hub model, you probably don’t need as many,” he said. “If you put a half-dozen in Bahrain, and then four or five in Sasebo, and a half-dozen in Mayport — and still have two or three in dry dock — that’s only about half the fleet up today.

“I don’t know what you would do with the other half. There [are] missions they could do, but they’re just too expensive to use on those missions.”

In a solicitation posted March 18, the Navy asked industry for ideas on how to reconfigure the Zumwalt class to host larger hypersonic missiles of a size that would not fit in the vertical launch system tubes currently installed on the ships. The service also wants that business to provide the missiles and supporting software and technology to support the missiles.

Specifically, the Navy is looking for ideas about installing an “advanced payload module” that can support the Navy’s conventional prompt strike missiles “in a three-pack configuration,” according to the notice.

Two sources familiar with discussions around the future of the Zumwalt class said it would be possible to replace the idle Advanced Gun System – the original raison d’être of the class designed to support Marine landings with gunfire support from well over the horizon – with the desired payload module supporting hypersonic missiles. Experts said that doing so would transform the DDG-1000s from ships in search of a mission into powerful conventional deterrent in the Indo-Pacific region.

Unlike with a submarine, having conventional prompt strike on a surface ship puts the capability on a platform that can be more easily tracked. The Chinese will know the U.S. has a threating capability in theater, potentially complicating any hopes for a fast and painless victory, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

“If we think of it kind of like a conventional [ballistic missile submarine], that model works,” Clark said.

The reason the idea works is that the Navy would have ships in theater that could fire missiles with a predetermined target list. Those missiles could be fired quickly and would have a high probability of hitting the targets inside Chinese territory. And while a submarine can also accomplish that, the fact that Zumwalt is a surface ship and more easily tracked makes it a more powerful conventional deterrent since a similarly equipped submarine is likely to be out of sight and out of mind, Clark said.

“It’s much lower on the escalation ladder – somewhere below where the SSBN would be – because it’s able to be tracked,” he said. “It’s got more transparency, so you can have that ability to signal that you wouldn’t have to the same degree with a [ballistic or guided missile submarine].

“You might keep one in the Western Pacific to do various other operations and then if you want to signal you mean business, or you’re trying to escalate things slightly, you send it to the South China Sea. Now it’s actually a threat to deep inland targets on the Chinese mainland.”

The Zumwalt was originally designed to creep up on an enemy shoreline, evading detection with its low radar cross-section design, and bombard the coast with a projectile that could fly more than 80 nautical miles to support a Marine landing.

But it became clear as the program went on that the intended mission was unlikely to materialize and the high cost of the platform ultimately pushed the Navy to truncate the purchase from 28 ships, to seven, and finally to three.

In 2016, the Navy canceled the AGS’s Long Range Land-Attack Projectile because the reduced Zumwalt plan pushed the cost per round up to more than $800,000.

And in 2018, the Navy said that even with the high cost of the round, the system was also failing to achieve the range the Navy was seeking, Vice Adm. Bill Merz, then the Navy’s top requirements officer, told lawmakers.

“Even at the high cost, we still weren’t really getting what we had asked for,” he said. “So, what we’ve elected to do is to separate the gun effort from the ship effort because we really got to the point where now we’re holding up the ship.”

The idea then evolved into using Zumwalt as a surface ship killer, which has now evolved again into adding a module with conventional prompt strike hypersonic missiles to the hull. The after-market payload module is necessary because the conventional prompt strike missiles are at least 30 inches in diameter, and the current 80-cell VLS launcher on the DDG-1000 design, while larger than the standard Mark 41 VLS on the cruisers and destroyers, maxes out at missiles that are 28 inches in diameter.

‘Something really special’

With three ships, the Navy could conceivably keep one on patrol, one working up for patrol, and one in maintenance at all times. That means the Navy could maintain a semi-permanent Zumwalt presence in the region.

Bryan McGrath, a retired destroyer skipper who runs the defense consultancy The FerryBridge Group, said the Navy needs to use the hulls to build a formidable conventional deterrent that is always on patrol in the South China Sea.

“We ought to spend the money and take the time to turn it into something really special,” McGrath said.

Calling his idea a “maritime dominance destroyer,” McGrath called for the Navy to strip the Zumwalt of the original combat system, replace it with the surface combatant fleet standard Aegis Combat System and turn it into the “mac daddy command and control ship for the South China Sea.”

In McGrath’s concept, the Zumwalts would be used not only to threaten targets deep inside Chinese territory, they would also function as a command and control hub for unmanned systems. On Monday, USNI News reported that a Zumwalt-class destroyer would be used to control unmanned systems in an upcoming exercise.

The ship should also operate with its own medium-altitude, long-endurance aerial drones for surveillance and targeting, McGrath said.

“Three of them forward-deployed in the Western Pacific, relieving each other on station, an embarked [admiral and] staff, organic medium-altitude, long endurance UAVs, conventional prompt strike and the Aegis Weapons System.

“That would be a serious a serious statement of intent that we are in the Western Pacific to stay and we are there to deter,” he said. “We will have this this platform that is as obvious or as stealthy as we wish it to be. And this, to me, is the future of the DDG-1000.”

The tradeoff, according to Clark, will be that the ship used this way will not and cannot be used like the current class of workhorse Arleigh Burke destroyers.

“You just have to buy into the fact that it’s not a Surface Warfare platform,” Clark said. “It can do a freedom-of-navigation operation, I guess, but it’s not going to be able to do anti-submarine warfare really. It’s not going to do [boardings and] maritime security.”

If the Navy has a comprehensive idea of how it wants to use the platform, Clark said, Congress will likely appropriate the extra money for the ship alterations.

“What Congress is looking for is a is a clear description of a mission that makes sense for the ship,” he said. “The original idea behind this ship sort of fell apart with the advent of anti-access, area denial technology and the Navy’s never had a really good story for how they intend to use it. So, what Congress wants now is: ‘Hey, give us a mission, give us a strong argument for what you would use this ship for.’”

With conventional prompt strike missiles, the Navy may just have found that argument.

The original contract was for nine boats with an option for a 10th, which brings the total cost of the contract with prime contractor General Dynamics Electric Boat to $24.1 billion. The net increase for the contract is $1.89 billion, according to a General Dynamics release. Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News shipyard is the partner yard in the program.

The president of General Dynamics Electric Boat, Kevin Graney, said in a statement that the shipyard is pleased to have the work and that his team is ready to take on the challenge of simultaneously building the Virginia class and the new — and much larger — Columbia-class next-generation ballistic missile submarine.

“The 17,000 shipbuilders of Electric Boat are pleased to receive the award for the tenth Block V ship and are ready to meet the generational challenge of building the Virginia and Columbia classes concurrently,” Graney said in a release. “We are grateful for the continued support of our federal delegation, who strongly advocated for this important funding.

“Today’s announcement maintains the two-ship per year production cadence, provides continuity and development to our skilled workforce and promotes stability in our national supply base.”

The 10th Block V Virginia-class submarine will include the Virginia Payload Module, an 84-foot section of the boat that will serve as an undersea vertical launcher for missiles.

The modern Virginia-class subs coming off the lines can hold 12 Tomahawk missiles in a launcher on the bow. With the payload module section added amidships, each of the Virginia Payload Modules on the Block Vs will have the capacity for 40 cruise missiles. In total, eight of the 10 boats in Block V will have the module.

With advancements in hypersonic missile technology, Virginia’s larger launcher will be well suited to host them once they are deployable. The Virginia subs will also host the new version of the anti-ship Maritime Strike Tomahawk, part of the Block V upgrade that will begin being delivered to the service next week.

The head of Naval Sea Systems Command, Vice Adm. Bill Galinis told the House Armed Services Committee readiness subcommittee that the Navy is studying how much money it would need to accelerate its ongoing 20-year, $21 billion plan to recapitalize its four public shipyards by five or ten years.

To go faster and meet the needs of a growing fleet, the Navy is trying to determine how to juggle ship maintenance and repair work with renovations of aging dry docks and equipment associated with its Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan, or SIOP. That may require extra funding, Galinis said.

Arguing that lengthy ship repairs and maintenance backlogs are straining the fleet, Virginia Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, who serves as vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and other lawmakers pressed the Navy on ways to improve, including expanding the use of private shipyards to supplement work at government-owned dry docks.

In response, Galinis said the Navy had all the laws required to fix the situation, but said he needed more money.

“I said I did not need any additional authorities, I did not say I didn’t need any additional resources,” Galinis said in an exchange.

Questions about the Navy’s 2018 SIOP surfaced almost immediately when it became apparent that the Navy’s $21 billion plan’s price tag was at best a rough guess.

Last year, the Heritage Foundation’s Maiya Clark released a report detailing the extent of the issues with the plan, not least of which is that it if everything went perfectly it would still not sufficiently expand shipyard capacity to service even today’s fleet, let alone a fleet with a growing number of nuclear-powered attack submarines.

“The SIOP is based on the current nuclear fleet, but it does not quite even meet the requirements of the current fleet,” the report read. “(It would make up for 67 of 68 missed maintenance availabilities, the missed availability being a submarine deactivation.) While this would be a massive improvement for the shipyards, it leaves little margin for unscheduled emergent work and does not allow for a potentially larger or different nuclear fleet in the future.”

In his testimony, Galinis acknowledged that the Navy would need to expand its infrastructure and lean more heavily on the private sector to accommodate the growing submarine force structure. In the meantime, the Navy is “taking a hard look” at which work can be outsourced to private machine shops as a way to increase capacity, Galinis told House Seapower Subcommittee Chair Joe Courtney, D-Conn.

“I applaud the fact that NAVSEA is going that route,” Courtney said.

Taking stock of dry docks

Lawmakers with big ship maintenance interests in their districts have been keenly interested in the Navy’s shipyard revitalization plans.

Earlier this week, Washington Democratic Rep. Derek Kilmer, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, led a letter urging President Joe Biden to prioritize funding for SIOP in his upcoming budget and in future years, as the plan transitions from the research and planning stages into execution.

Readiness Subcommittee Chair John Garamendi, D-Calif., helped secure a $90 million funding line for SIOP in the defense policy bill Congress passed in December. On Friday, he wanted to know if the public shipyards would be sufficiently modernized to maintain future platforms like Columbia-class submarine, due to enter service in 2031.

“I am concerned that the Navy will not dedicate the necessary resources to prioritize this effort and that a 20-year time horizon is too long to support a changing fleet,” Garamendi said of SIOP.

In her report, Clark noted that many of the Navy’s dry docks are not suitable for the task of even maintaining the current fleet. For example, many dry docks that can currently service the Los Angeles-class attack submarines are wholly inadequate for the newest class.

“The Navy’s attack submarines have also evolved, but the dry docks that service them have not: 17 dry docks can service older Los Angeles-class submarines, but only 12 can accommodate their replacement, the Virginia-class submarine, and only seven can service the newest Block V Virginia-class submarine, which is 83 feet longer than earlier variants and displaces an additional 2,400 tons,” the report reads.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday in December acknowledged the dry dock shortfalls and said that that the Navy considers the SIOP effort a “high priority,” adding that the service plans to invest nearly $1 billion in military construction dollars per year across the four shipyards.

“These dry docks on average, as you know, are over 100 years old and we’ve neglected them for too long,” he said. “And this is a strategic decision by the department to make this a priority and put the money where we need to, or we can’t sustain the fleet of the future. As you know, we’re challenged to sustain the fleet that we have now.”

“I was really disappointed with the lack of substance,” Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., said during a hearing with the House Armed Services’ sea power subcommittee. “I thought it was full of buzzwords and platitudes but really short on details.”

Most notably, the Navy did not seem to have many answers as to what changes it would make to avoid costly mistakes such as the Remote Multi-Mission Vehicle, an unmanned system that was expected to form the backbone of the littoral combat ship’s mine-hunting mission package but was canceled in 2016 with hundreds of millions of dollars already sunk into the effort.

High-profile failures, such as the RMMV, are at the core of the Navy’s credibility problem on Capitol Hill. And if the Unmanned Campaign Plan released to the public was part of the effort to restore Congress’ trust, it’s unclear how many were swayed.

“With the recent acquisition failures on the last several ship classes, those of us on this committee are skeptical of the Navy’s ability to shepherd this new technology into employable assets that contribute to the lethality of those forces,” Luria said at the hearing.

According to Vice Adm. James Kilby, the Navy’s top requirements officer, the document released this week was to serve explicitly as a framework while specific plans and timelines — even some systems under development today — are classified. In a March 16 roundtable with reporters, Kilby said the document signals the Navy is making progress.

“When we tried to produce this, documented at an unclassified level, we really were just signaling a rallying around and an understanding that this is a complex thing,” Kilby said.

The document also outlines that the Navy is shifting away from a focus on building large, expensive platforms and instead focusing more on fielding capabilities with an eye to how unmanned systems can be useful in meeting naval requirements.

“Through a capabilities-based approach we can build a future where unmanned systems are at the front lines of our competitive advantage,” the document read. “The Naval force needs to move toward a capability-centric proactive environment able to incorporate unmanned systems at the speed of technology, to provide maximum agility to the future force.”

That approach may differ from the approach taken with the RMMV, which was conceived from the outset as means to “get the man out of the minefield” by having an unmanned system find and neutralize a mine. The technology proved unreliable and unworkable, and the Navy has yet to field its replacement system for the LCS mine warfare mission package.

The subject of the RMMV came up at the hearing Thursday, after Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., used it to illustrate a point about preventing programs from lingering long after it appears unlikely they’ll succeed.

“The program went on entirely too long, we didn’t take lessons learned and we sacrificed needed capability based on the promise that something better would be coming along,” Wittman said.

Jay Stefany, the Navy’s interim assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition, told Wittman that the service’s early prototyping effort lets officials look at developing technologies earlier, allowing the Navy to make more informed decisions about moving forward with programs.

“Part of our effort is now to build one or two prototypes and get it into sailors’ and Marines’ hands,” Stefany said. “[They can] use it, see if it’s reliable and see if it’s going to meet the intent that we need it for, make sure our engineering community is heavily involved to make sure it’s going to have the tried-and-true reliability when we get it out there. And if we see a need, to do both land-based and at-sea testing before we move forward with acquiring them in quantity.”

‘It was just very thin’

But if the Navy plans to move away from a platform-focused approach and toward thinking about capabilities and how unmanned systems could provide them, there was precious little of that in the document, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former senior aid to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, who is now retired.

“There was really no discussion about what missions or operational applications they saw as being useful for unmanned systems to perform,” Clark said. “And so it’s hard for the reader to understand: ‘Well, what’s so compelling about these unmanned systems that we need to spend money and time on them?’ ”

“They didn’t do a very good job of describing what missions they thought were most amenable to unmanned systems and why they were important for those missions. And that would be a way to explain why it’s so important that they develop them. It also didn’t explain why certain ones are going to have a high priority, because they deal with very high-priority missions,” he added. “It was very thin on that.”

That becomes an issue when one of the main goals of the document was to close a credibility gap with lawmakers who view the Navy’s track record as less than stellar in bringing along new technologies, Clark said.

“Part of the goal here is to reassure Congress and leaders in the government that the Navy’s got a good plan for its unmanned systems portfolio, and that it should be supported in its proposed budgets,” Clark said. “If I read this from the congressional perspective, I’m kind of like: ‘OK, well, this describes what you’re doing. I get zero sense of why you think it’s important that we invest in the next generation of these things because I don’t know what they’re going to do.’ ”

The framework as released lacks any milestones or mechanisms for Congress to hold the Navy accountable, which is a major problem if the service wants to restore trust on Capitol Hill, he added.

“If this is the centerpiece of the campaign plan document, it really missed the opportunity to describe how the Navy was going to go about maturing these systems and over what time periods,” he said. “Because they talk about accountability being one of the reasons they did the campaign plan, yet I don’t see any mechanisms in there that I could use, if I was Congress, to hold people accountable.”

The framework is also missing an organizational signal that the Navy is changing its ways in order to improve its track record on fielding new systems, such as creating a new office or empowering an existing office with new authorities. That stands in contrast with Navy’s push toward a reliable communications network that connect weapons, sensors and platforms over a wide area like the Western Pacific.

Kilby told reporters there the Navy will not reorganize itself around advancing unmanned systems. He said the Navy has delivered unmanned systems in the past but not in a focused way and not as part of a broader effort to match those systems with missions in the fleet. Increased threats from peer competitors have put a new sense of urgency into those initiatives.

That has increased the sense of urgency inside the service, he said, and the Navy is committed to fielding a “hybrid” fleet of manned and unmanned systems.

“I’m not an advocate of reorganizing for reorganizing sake,” Kilby said. “I am an advocate of understanding the problem [and] going after it, which is what we’re trying to do with this plan.”

The new Block V, when fully realized in its Block Va and Block Vb varieties, will be expected to hit surface ships at Tomahawk ranges — in excess of 1,000 miles — with the integration of a new seeker. It also will integrate a new warhead with a broader range of capabilities, including greater penetrating power.

Tomahawk’s range is especially important in the Asia-Pacific region, where China’s rocket force has extraordinary reach with its DF-26 and DF-21 missiles, with ranges of 2,490 and 1,335 miles respectively, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The U.S. Navy’s news missiles are destined not just for the vertical launching systems on surface ships but also on attack submarines that can more easily operate inside the range of China’s rocket force.

The Navy is expected to make a decision on the future of the Tomahawk weapon in 2021, but the signs seem to point to its continuation. The service has had a long-running search for a next-generation land-attack missile, but a recent analysis of alternatives led to the Navy restarting the Tomahawk line and upgrading its current inventory.

In the Navy’s 2021 budget documents submitted last year, the service said it had yet to determine the future of the missile. But in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Phil Davidson, specifically cited the anti-ship Maritime Strike Tomahawk specifically and the surface-strike variant of the SM-6 as capabilities needed by the Marine Corps in its quest to hold Chinese ships at risk from shore-based missiles.

“What the Marine Corps has asked for have already been developed in the [Navy] and is employed on Navy ships, things like Maritime Strike Tomahawk, SM-6. These are immediate capabilities that I think should be made available to the Marine Corps,” Davidson said.

Advances in missile technology might actually be helping the Tomahawk’s cause to stay in the Navy’s vertical launching system missile tubes longer, according to Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

The combination of the SM-6, the new 100-plus-mile ranged anti-ship Naval Strike Missile bound for the littoral combat ships and next-generation frigate, and the Block V upgrades on Tomahawk will give the Navy’s weapons a place in the service’s vertical launching system cells for some time to come, Clark said in a December interview.

“Between Tomahawk Block V, the SM-6 and the NSM, the Navy has a collection of attack weapons that they are happy with,” he said, adding that a long-running effort to develop a next-generation land-attack weapon has lost some of its urgency.”

That means as hypersonic cruise missiles make developmental progress, the Navy will likely make do with its current generation of weapons instead of embarking on an expensive next-generation land-attack weapons program.

“What’s happening in parallel is in the development of hypersonic missile that are a smaller form factor than the boost-glide weapons that are coming to maturity now,” Clark said. “And if they can get it down to being able to fit in [the Mark 41], then that could provide the Navy a next-generation capability that is more survivable and has a shorter time of flight.

“So I think this combination of missiles the Navy has now, combined with the fact that the hypersonic weapons are coming along a little further out, means the Navy is going to stick with what it has potentially even longer than it had originally anticipated.”

“This is one of the things that gets revisited again and again, and I’ll tell you now that I will fight for the same outcome as last Congress,” said House Armed Services Committee Vice Chair Elaine Luria, D-Va., said Monday at a Hudson Institute event. “We’ve invested a lot in our carriers, and it’s not time to decommission them halfway through their life.”

Retiring an aircraft carrier early would save the Navy several billion dollars in both planned maintenance, personnel and operating costs over the remainder of the ship’s life, but such efforts have repeatedly been quashed by Congress going back at least a decade.

The Pentagon is expected to propose a budget that is essentially the same as last year’s, and to save money it is revisiting a Trump Administration proposal to cancel the carrier Harry S. Truman’s mid-life overhaul and nuclear reactor refueling, according to a report from USNI News.

In 2019, the Navy said it could save as much as $1.5 billion just in planning costs for the refueling, and when the Navy tried to cancel the George Washington’s midlife overhaul in 2013, it was estimated that retiring Washington would save a total of about $5 billion total for the years-long maintenance period.

But retiring a carrier with a planned 25 years left of service has always been a bridge too far for Congress, and there is little reason to believe a renewed attempt to retire Truman would be any more successful than the last two times DoD tried.

To Luria, considering retiring an aircraft carrier is a puzzling move in light of a building consensus that the Navy will, in some way, need to grow to meet an ever-expanding Chinese fleet, which already surpasses the U.S. Navy in raw ship count.

With less than four months left in the Trump administration, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper unveiled a new vision for the Navy, called Battle Force 2045, that eclipsed previous plans to grow the fleet to 355 ships to instead grow it to more than 500 manned and unmanned vessels.

“The bottom line is getting rid of ships when you’re trying to build the Navy is not a smart decision, and I would like justification as to why,” Luria said.

Virginia home fires

In 2019, President Donald Trump’s Pentagon proposed cutting Truman as part of a plan to pivot to more unmanned technologies and to free up money for a planned two-carrier block-buy for the follow-on Ford class. But Trump reversed course after a bipartisan group of lawmakers opposed it, arguing the Truman has more than 20 years of life left and that U.S. law requires 11 carriers be in service.

Then, as now, lawmakers from Virginia – home to the country’s largest naval base and where spending makes up more than 10 percent of the economy – were leading the charge.

“As was made clear to the previous administration, retiring the USS Harry S. Truman two decades ahead of schedule would be a serious mistake given the capabilities it provides to the Navy,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a statement to Defense News.

In broader remarks Monday, Luria recommended extending the service-life of older types of ships while new classes of ships are being brought online. As opposed to the Battle Force 2045 plan, which called for aggressively decommissioning cruisers, Luria wanted a deeper analysis.

“In our pursuit of a larger fleet and more presence in the Pacific, you need to build more ships, we also need to maintain the ships that we have, and operate them as efficiently as possible,” she said. “And we need to quit getting rid of the ships we have that still have operational life left.”

The Virginia delegation’s opposition to retiring carriers is long lived. In 2010, when then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates suggested that the Navy didn’t need 11 aircraft carriers, then-Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va.,

Senate Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee Chair Tim Kaine, D-Va., pointed to the cost of recycling the nuclear carrier Enterprise ($1.5 billion) and recent 11 month deployment of the USS Nimitz to the Mideast and Pacific as proof carriers are “expensive to retire and remain in constant demand.”

“I am skeptical this proposal will yield savings or avoid severe operational impacts,” Kaine said in a statement.

Both Luria and the House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee’s top Republican, Rep. Rob Wittman, also pointed to recent, lengthy carrier deployments to meet the demands of combatant commanders.

“It is obvious based on deployment schedule that we are breaking the fleet trying to supply the COCOMs the volume of carriers being requested — and now the Department is mulling removing one from circulation earlier?” Wittman, of Virginia, said in a statement to Defense News on Monday.

“I understand looking for savings, but this doesn’t pass the smell test. If the Department decides to attempt a to cancel an RCOH again, I am confident they will be met with a strong Congressional rebuke.”

Luria and Wittman each represent districts that touch the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. The Truman is homeported there at Naval Station Norfolk.

At a hearing last week, Wittman asked U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s chief, Adm. Phil Davidson, if he thought it would make sense to remove a carrier from the fleet. Davidson replied, “There is no capability that we have that can substitute for an aircraft carrier in my view.”

Engineers from the Naval Surface Warfare Centers Carderock Division and Philadelphia Division carried out tests late last year on Zumwalt as part of the ship’s Performance and Special Trials, which are conducted on the lead ship of every class to test how the ship behaves in various sea conditions.

The ship held its own through the high end of Sea State 6, which means 20-foot seas, according to a Naval Sea Systems Command press release, with ship and crew performing at acceptable levels according to the parameters of the test.

“There were no exceedances of critical motion criteria limits,” the release read.

The test results confirmed what the ship’s commanding officer told Defense News last January: That Zumwalt’s tumblehome hull design performed well in heavy seas, meaning the tumblehome hull could be viable for future classes of a surface combatant.

While underway in spring 2019, Capt. Andrew Carlson and the crew of Zumwalt took the ship to Alaska, where they experienced some heavy seas.

“We took advantage of a storm up near Alaska that presented us with Sea State Six conditions,” said Carlson, referring to sea’s waves between 13 and 20 feet high. “All told I’d rather be on that ship than any other ship I’ve been on.”

The motion of the ship is different from previous classes of ship, Carlson told Defense News, but all told said it handles heavy seas better than other ships he has served on.

“You definitely have to get used to the roll, which is very short compared to other ships,” Carlson said. “For those of us who have been on cruisers, especially up top, you kind of lean over 15 degrees and you wonder if you are going to come back. We didn’t experience any of that. As long as you get used to the finer oscillation, it really handles very well.”

The next step for Carderock will be to take the data from the testing on Zumwalt back to its enormous wave pool in the Maryland D.C. suburb and replicate the conditions on their model.

“Effectively, we will be re-running critical portions of the trial at model scale onsite at Carderock,” said Stephen Minnich, who ran the testing on Zumwalt, according to the press release. “This will enable us to quantify the differences between our model-scale predictions and our full-scale observations.”

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy has transferred authorities over networks and IT systems to a newly created office dedicated to Project Overmatch, the service’s plan for a connected force for future battles, C4ISRNET has learned.

The Navy shifted several network and IT-related technical authorities held by Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Air Systems Command and Naval Information Warfare Systems Command to the direct report program manager for Project Overmatch, according to a memo C4ISRNET obtained.

“As a DRPM, effective immediately, Project Overmatch has all program authorities for Research and Development, Acquisition and Sustainment programs related to warfighting networks, including the networking needs for unmanned systems and long range fires,” stated the memo dated Feb. 23. “In addition, the DRPM is responsible for developing a unified approach to the data, infrastructure and tools and analytics needed at the operational and tactical levels to execute DMO [distributed maritime operations] as envisioned.”

Under that vision for potential conflicts with advanced adversaries, the Navy’s ships could be dispersed across a wide area but connected by a secure network.

Project Overmatch is the Navy’s effort to enable that all-connected force for the Pentagon’s priority plan of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, in which sensors and shooters are linked across domains. Rear Adm. Douglas Small, who leads the project, was named the direct report program manager in an October memo, and he reports to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

The move will give Small authority over the “applicable” war-fighting networks, technical architectures and standards, and will “expand authorities to include data management designs and standards for platform integration and data interoperability.”

The memo is signed by Frederick Stefany, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, and Adm. William Lescher, vice chief of naval operations.

“The memo signed by Mr. Stefany and ADM Lescher is the next step in codifying CNO’s October 2020 memo.  This recent memo enables the transfer of requisite authorities to RADM Small so he can effectively and efficiently execute the CNO’s directives,” said Lt. Courtney Callaghan, spokesperson for the Navy. “Critical to Project Overmatch is the development of networks, infrastructure, data architecture, tools and analytics that support the operational and developmental environment that will enable sustained maritime dominance using manned and unmanned systems.”

The Project Overmatch DRPM will also be tasked with developing a unified approach to the data, infrastructure, tools and analytics “needed at the operational and tactical levels to execute DMO as envisioned.”

The DRPM will also include a senior executive service deputy director position that will focus on Overmatch and staffing needs, working with leaders inside the Navy’s Digital Integration Support Cell and necessary program integration offices “to ensure a ‘whole of Navy’ enterprise team across Program Executive Offices (PEO) and System Commands (SYSCOM).”

Additionally, all science and technology efforts related to war-fighting networks and advanced data architectures and analytics will fall under the DRPM, according to the memo.

The Navy’s move to consolidate Overmatch responsibilities underneath one office is important as the military services look to break down stovepipes to move toward Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The Army and Air Force have similar projects, Project Convergence and Advanced Battle Management System, respectively.