Posted on 05/11/2003 6:24:45 AM PDT by VaBthang4
CVN 21 said to offer biggest changes in decades, seeking a ‘leap ahead’ in technology
by Harold Kennedy
The U.S. Navy is moving ahead with plans for its much-debated, next-generation aircraft carrier, now called CVN 21. The service has requested $1.5 billion in its fiscal year 2004 budget for research, development and engineering and advanced procurement for the ship.
CVN 21 is scheduled to begin construction in 2007 and to be delivered in 2014, according to Rear Adm. Dennis M. Dwyer, the Navy’s program executive officer for aircraft carriers.
The budget for the entire project “now stands at $11.7 billion,” Dwyer told a press briefing in Washington, D.C.
Of that amount, he said, $5 billion is “a one-time, non-recurring cost” of the design for the entire class of ships. “The actual construction cost of the first ship of the class is $6.7 billion in fiscal ‘07 dollars,” he said. Some estimates had put the cost as high as $10 billion, which Dwyer dismissed as “a good myth we’d like to debunk.”
CVN 21 will reflect the first major changes in carrier design since work began on the USS Nimitz, almost half a century ago, Dwyer told reporters. The Nimitz, CVN 68, was deployed in 1975, but work on her began much earlier, he said.
“Actually, the early design for the Nimitz was done in the late 1950s,” Dwyer said. “If you take the time period between Nimitiz and CVN-21, it’s the same time period between [the USS] Langley—the first carrier—and Nimitz.” The Langley, CV 1, was commissioned in 1922.
“You can see the challenge,” Dwyer said. “If anybody’s got to go design a new carrier, I’m glad I’m the one.”
The redesign is necessary, the admiral explained, for two major reasons. “One of them is sheer weight,” he said. “We need to get newer, lighter systems that reduce the weight that’s on the ships.” The other factor is the need for increased electrical power, he said.
A lighter, more powerful ship will save “a tremendous amount of money in total ownership costs over the life of the ship,” Dwyer said. “You can make up that R&D expense pretty quickly.”
The Navy originally had planned to introduce design enhancements gradually to its class of carriers, building first a CVNX 1 and later an improved CVNX 2.
But Defense Department officials decided that planned improvements for CVNX 1 were not dramatic enough to justify the expense. Instead, they chose to meet the president’s stated goal to “skip a generation” of technology. They combined the CVNX 1 and 2 steps “into a single, transformational ship design that accommodates continuous evolution through the life of the class,” Hansford T. Johnson, acting Navy secretary, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The result, CVN 21, is providing an opportunity to reexamine “the way that we build and design ships and to set the baseline for the rest of the family of ships” that are in the works, including the littoral combat ship, DD(X) destroyer and Virginia-class submarine, Dwyer said. Plans for CVN 21 include dozens of new technologies.
A redesigned nuclear reactor, for example, supplies 25 percent more power for propulsion, with half the maintenance costs and half of the sailors to operate it.
More Electrical Power
“You can use the steam from the nuclear reactor to do other things,” Dwyer said. “One of the other things is to make electricity. This will provide CVN 21 with three times the electrical power that’s currently on the Nimitz.”
An electromagnetic aircraft launching system will replace the steam-powered system used on current ships. Steam requires a lot of maintenance, especially in a corrosive, maritime environment, Dwyer said. “If we made everything electric, we could save a lot of ownership costs and take the workload off the sailors.”
Two contractors, Northrop Grumman Corporation, of Los Angeles, and General Atomics, of San Diego, are building full-scale models of the system, called EMALS, and “sometime in the summer, we’re going to have a shoot-off—or a fly-off”—Dwyer said.
The Naval Air Systems Command, headquartered at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, is working on an advanced arresting gear, using an improved system of trapping aircraft as they land, Dwyer said. The new system “is an electrical, hydraulic combination,” he explained. It is designed to handle emerging platforms, such as the F/A-18E/F and the Joint Strike Fighter, which are heavier and able to return to the ship with more unexpended munitions than their predecessors.
CVN 21 will employ an integrated warfare system, Dwyer explained. Diverse electronic systems, such as sensors, command and control, and self defense, will be combined into a single, open-architecture, scalable weapons system, based on commercial, off-the-shelf technologies.
“We’d like everything to plug and play,” said Dwyer. “Right now, the way we build aircraft carriers is to buy all the electronic equipment up front, then take seven years to build a ship and deliver it with obsolete electronics. It’s kind of crazy now that you think about it.
“We don’t want to do that any more,” he said. “What we’d like to do is put the electronic equipment in separately from the actual shipbuilding process.”
Navy officials originally had planned to install the integrated warfare system in CVN 77, but it was cut for budgetary reasons. They still intend to add it to the ship during the post-construction phase, Dwyer said.
The Navy is working with the prime contractor, Northrop Grumman’s Newport News subsidary, in Newport News, Va., to design and install a so-called smart deck, equipped with flexible fiber-optic cable, which is easier to move and repair than hard copper wiring.
The island—the tower on the flight deck, where ship operations are controlled—is being redesigned. Command and decision centers are being moved from the island, to the smart deck, down lower in the ship. The ship’s bridge and the flight-operations center will remain in the island.
The island also is being moved to make better use of the flight deck, Dwyer said. “The people who actually handle aircraft said, ‘The island’s in the wrong place. It makes the aircraft all jam up. Why don’t you move it?’”
As a result, he explained, the island is being shifted 80 to 100 feet aft. Elevators, avionics and electronic support systems also are being moved. The whole idea, he said, is to create a racetrack-like pattern on the flight deck, with “pit stop” parking, so that aircraft could move more efficiently.
These changes will enable CVN 21 to raise its number of sorties—operational flights by individual aircraft—from about 140 to 160 a day, with the ability to sure up to 220 a day, if necessary.
To enhance survivability, the fuel tanks and magazines, where the bombs, missiles and other munitions are stored, are getting more armor, and the hull is being reinforced for greater protection against mines and torpedoes.
“The carrier is the most survivable ship the Navy has right now,” Dwyer said. “CVN 21 will be the most survivable carrier.”
Smaller Crew
These changes will enable the size of the ship’s crew—which does not include some 2,500 personnel in the air wing—to be reduced from about 3,000 to 2,500 and possibly as low as 2,100, Dwyer said.
“That comes from two principal areas,” Dwyer explained. In the reactor department, simplifications are being made, he said, and in the air department, “where we have all those sailors lugging bombs around. They won’t be needed any more.”
CVN 21 will have to accommodate unmanned combat air vehicles, Dwyer said. “We’ve got to step up to UCAVs. Not an unmanned airborne vehicle, but an unmanned combat vehicle, which looks like a jet plane, a little shorter, with bombs on it. How are we going to do this? Take off and land an unmanned jet fighter? That’s a big step.”
The decision to go ahead with CVN 21 was well received among the 18,000 workers employed at Newport News’ 550-acre shipyard on the James River. “It’s critically important to us,” said Matt Mulherin, vice president for Newport News’ CVN 21 program. “Half of our business is carrier construction.”
Combining CVN 1 and 2, however, “certainly accelerated our timeline,” Mulherin told National Defense. “I have a lot more gray hairs than I did before.”
Newport News is the nation’s only designer, builder and refueler of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Currently, it is building the last two of the Nimitz-class of carriers.
The USS Ronald Reagan, CVN 76, is nearly complete. It was scheduled to be commissioned in May, but that event has been postponed until mid-summer, according to Newport News spokesperson Jerri Dicksecki.
Reasons cited for the slippage: Ship-construction delays slowed equipment installation, hundreds of circuit breakers had quality-control problems, and unusually wet winter weather hampered the ability to do major jobs, such as applying non-skid paint to the flight deck.
Despite this delay, plans still call for the ship to be deployed in 2005, Dicksecki said.
The Reagan incorporates dozens of new technologies into its design, Dicksecki noted. These include a bulbous bow, which provides more buoyancy to the forward end of the ship and additional lift to the flight deck. An integrated control and advanced network, or ICAN, will link controls for machinery, navigation, voice communications and other systems. Air conditioning, medical facilities and quarters for female crew members will be upgraded.
The next carrier, CVN 77, is about 23 percent finished, Dwyer said. In December, CVN 77 was named for former President George H.W. Bush, who won the Distinguished Flying Cross as a naval aviator during World War II.
The USS George H.W. Bush is scheduled to join the fleet in 2008, replacing the 42-year-old, non-nuclear-powered USS Kitty hawk, CV 63. The Bush is viewed as a transition carrier, serving as a bridge between the Nimitz class and CVN 21. She will feature:
nMajor changes in aircraft fuel storage and distribution systems.
nA “flexible island” design that will accommodate phased array radars, when they are ready for installation.
nA commercial, off-the-shelf oxygen and nitrogen generation system.
nA new, COTS-based flight-deck crane.
nA vacuum collection, holding and transfer system for shipboard sewage and waste water.
Currently, the Navy has 12 aircraft carriers in service. They are the largest warships in the world. The Nimitz is 1,092 feet long—almost as long as the Empire State Building is tall—and it soars 20 stories above the waterline.
Carriers, home to almost 6,000 men and women, are like small cities. They offer such urban amenities as daily newspapers, radio and television stations, libraries, convenience markets, barber shops, beauty parlors, laundries and even post offices with their own zip codes.
The firepower of just one carrier is equal to that of an entire air force of some countries. The Nimitz, for example, hosts 85 combat aircraft. Its armament also includes Sea Sparrow missiles and the 20 mm Phalanx close-in weapons system.
Also, carriers rarely travel alone. Each is usually accompanied by a heavily armed battle group of two cruisers, four destroyers, two attack submarines, eight helicopters and a fast combat support ship, assigned in large part to protect the flattop.
In recent years, some officials—such as retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, now director of the Defense Department’s office of force transformation—have argued that the Navy should shift its emphasis away from carriers and other large ships toward smaller vessels designed to operate close to shore.
Carrier advocates responded that the flattops have proven their ability several times recently to move quickly across oceans, at speeds in excess of 30 knots, to assert U.S. military power into conflicts such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and now Iraq. Five carriers and their battle groups participating in the war against Iraq.
Unlike Air Force aircraft and Army ground forces, carriers and their air wings need no land bases in places such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Dwyer said. In fact, he noted, a carrier can substitute for an Army installation. In the early days of the Afghanistan campaign, the navy stripped the Kitty Hawk of its air wing and made it a base for special operations troops.
We only had seven carriers, when Pearl was attacked. CV's 2 through 8. (CV-1 Langley had been converted to a Seaplane tender).
Three of these were in the Pacific, and none of them were damaged at Pearl.
But over the course of 1942, we moved three of the Atlantic Carriers into the Pacific, because the Japanese kept sinking or disabling the carriers we had. Only Ranger was left in the Atlantic, despite the desparation of the submarine warfare there.
Out of the six carriers we moved to the Pacific, four had been sunk by October. And the other two were out of service due to battle damage for extended periods.
Saratoga was in the dock at Bremerton from January to May, and at Pearl from August to November.
Enterprise was in the dock at Pearl for much of September and October, was severely damaged on October 26th, but continued to operate until November 16th, because she was the only carrier in the Pacific still floating.
It wasn't that only six carrier hulls were sunk, but that damned-near all of our carriers were sunk, in the year following Pearl.
The USS Scoop Jackson may be okay.
I realize that carriers are the in thing these days, but recall the old saying, " We have the targets and they have the bullets." In this case the bullets are tactical nuclear weapons in the 100 to 500 kiloton range. God forbid that one should ever strike a carrier.
I was a kid living in a FL coastal town during the early days of WWII. We had to black out our windows and car headlights because German subs were operating just a few miles offshore. Ships running along the coast were silhouetted aganst the glow of town lights before the blackouts and were easy targets. Of course we were never actually in danger of being invaded, but the blackouts and reports of ships torpedoed right offshore gave us the impression that the war wasn't that far away.
I spent lots of time planning how I would use my grandfather's single shot .22 rifle to repel invaders if and when they hit our beaches. I think the Germans and Japanese got word of my plans and that's why they never tried to invade.
We researched them and then dropped the idea many, many years ago. Those things move really fast, but you can't make them very smart or adaptive for technical reasons. On a surprise shot you might be able to score a hit with these things with quite a bit of efficacy, but if your target knows you are there these become much more dubious. The US opted instead for very smart and adaptive versions of standard torpedos. It may take the torpedo quite a bit longer to reach the target, but it will hardly ever miss. As you may have noticed, a key calculus of US military technology is to prefer weapon systems that never miss over weapon systems that deliver tons of firepower but aren't that smart. It allows us to kill more with less ordnance in less time net, and we decided that in submarine warfare it was more important to be as smart and lethal as possible with speed coming in second.
I would note that we do have a naval stealth technology that makes solid objects invisible to active sonar, and the super-cavitating torpedos may be a "second-best" technology to counter some of problems you would have if your torpedos can't "see" the sub they are supposed to hit. If your target doesn't reflect acoustics, the only way you can kill it is with a straight intersection shot from a passive sonar target solution, which the super-cavitating torpedos would be a better choice for.
I'm not really worried about them being aimed at our subs. I'm more concerned with one of those lucky shots taking out an aircraft carrier. A scary thought for me is a torpedo like that being hidden on an innocent looking fishing vessel. I also find Silkworm missiles worrying for this same reason.
I'm sure the Navy is staying abreast of this problem but taking out one of our carriers surely is a desired goal for our enemies. I can imagine Russia developing a weapon like that and selling it to the highest bidder...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.