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July 12, 2018 | International, Naval

Destroyers Maxed Out, Navy Looks To New Hulls: Power For Radars & Lasers

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ARLINGTON: The Navy has crammed as much electronics as it can into its new DDG-51 Flight III destroyers now beginning construction, Rear Adm. William Galinis said this morning. That drives the service towards a new Large Surface Combatant that can comfortably accommodate the same high-powered radars, as well as future weapons such as lasers, on either a modified DDG-51 hull or an entirely new design.

“It's going to be more of an evolutionary approach as we migrate from the DDG-51 Flight IIIs to the Large Surface Combatant,” said Galinis, the Navy's Program Executive Officer for Ships. (LSC evolved from the Future Surface Combatant concept and will serve along a new frigate and unmanned surface vessels). “(We) start with a DDG-51 flight III combat system and we build off of that, probably bringing in a new HME (Hull, Mechanical, & Engineering) infrastructure, a new power architecture, to support that system as it then evolves going forward.”

“Before the end of the year, we'll start reaching out to industry to start sharing some of the thoughts we have and where we think we're going,” Galinis told a Navy League breakfast audience. “We'll bring industry into this at the right point, but we're still kind of working a lot of the technology pieces and what the requirements are right now.”

Evolution, Not Revolution

This evolutionary approach is similar to how the current Aegis combat system entered service on the CG-47 Ticonderoga cruisers in 1983 but came into its own on the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke destroyers. (Despite the difference in names, the two classes are virtually the same size). The DDG-51 is now the single most common type in the fleet, a vital part of the hoped-for 355-ship Navy, with some ships expected to serve into the 2070s:

  • There are now 64 Arleigh Burkes of various sub-types in service;
  • nine of the latest Flight IIA variant are in various stages of construction; and
  • work is beginning on the new Flight IIIs in Mississippi (Huntington Ingalls Industries) and Maine (General Dynamics-owned Bath Iron Works).

The Navy is doubling down on long-standing programs to keep its older warships up to date and on par with the newest versions. But the current destroyers just won't be able to keep up with the Flight III, which will have a slightly modified hull and higher-voltage electricity to accommodate Raytheon's massive new Air & Missile Defense Radar. A stripped down version of the AMDR, the Enterprise Air Search Radar (EASR, also by Raytheon) is already going on amphibious ships and might just fit on older Burkes as well, however.

But it's tight. On the Flight III, even with the hull modifications, “you kind of get to the naval architectural limits of the DDG-51 hullform,” Galinis told a Navy League breakfast this morning. “That's going to bring a lot of incredible capabilities to the fleet but there's also a fair amount of technical risk.”

The Navy is laboring mightily to reduce that risk on Flight III with simulations and land-based testing, including a full prototype of the new power plant being built in Philadelphia. But it's clear the combat system is out of room to grow within the limits of the current hull.

So how different does the next ship need to be? “How much more combat capability can we squeeze into the current hullform?” Galinis said. “Do we use the DDG-51 hullform and maybe expand that? Do we build a new hullform?”

“We're looking at all the options, Sydney,” he said when reporters clustered around him after his talk. “(It's in) very, very early stages... to say it'll be one system over another or one power architecture over another, it's way too early.”

“We're still working through what that power architecture looks like,” Galinis told the breakfast. “Do we stay with a more traditional (gas-driven) system... or do we really make that transition to an integrated electric plant — and at some point, probably, bring in energy storage magazines...to support directed energy weapons and things like that?”

The admiral's referring here to anti-missile lasers, railguns, and other high-tech but electricity-hungry systems. Having field-tested a rather jury-rigged 30 kilowatt laseron the converted amphibious ship Ponce, the Navy's next step is a more permanent, properly integrated installation next year on an amphibious ship, LPD-27 Portland. (Subsequent LPDs won't have the laser under current plans). But Portland is part of the relatively roomy LPD-17 San Antonio class, which has plenty of space, weight capacity, power, and cooling capacity (SWAP-C) available, in large part because the Navy never installed a planned 16 Vertical Launch System (VLS) tubes in the bow. By contrast, while the Navy's studying how to fit a laser on the Arleigh Burkes, the space and electricity available are much tighter.

The DDG-1000 Digression

The larger DDG-1000 Zumwalt class does have integrated electric drive that's performing well in sea trials, Galinis said. (That said, the brand-new DDG-1001, Michael Monsoor, has had glitches with the harmonic filter that manages the power and, more recently, with its turbine engine blades). “We've learned a lot from DDG-1000” that the Navy's now applying both to its highest priority program, the Columbia-class nuclear missile submarine, and potentially to the future Large Surface Combatant as well.

In other ways, DDG-1000 is a dead end, too large and expensive for the Navy to afford in quantity. The Navy truncated the class to just three ships and restarted Arleigh Burke production, which it had halted on the assumption the Zumwalts would be built in bulk.

Today, the Zumwalt‘s very mission is in doubt. The ship was designed around a 155 mm gun with revolutionary rocket-boosted shells, but ammunition technology hasn't reached the ranges the Navy wanted for the original mission of bombarding targets ashore. With the resurgence of the Russian fleet and the rise of China's, the Navy now wants to turn the DDG-1000s into ship-killers, which requires even longer ranges because modern naval battle is a duel of missiles.

The gun's place in ship-to-ship combat is “probably not a significant role, at least not at the ranges we're interested in,” Galinis told reporters. While the Navy could invest in long-range cannon ammunition, he said, it's paused work on several potential shells it test-fired last summer, awaiting the final mission review. If the Zumwalts do move to the anti-ship mission, which Galinis said they would be well suited for with minor modifications, their guns will be less relevant than their 80 Advanced VLS missile tubes or future weapons such as railguns drawing on their prodigious electric power.

That power plant might evolve into the electric heart of the future Large Surface Combatant — or it might not.

“We're going to have the requirements discussion with Navy leadership and then we're going to want to engage industry as we start thinking about what options might be available,” Galinis said. “Frankly industry's probably best suited to try to help us with the technology piece, especially if we start thinking (that) we want an innovative electric plant.....We'd go to probably the big power electronics/power system vendors, who really work in that field and have the best information on where technology's going.”

https://breakingdefense.com/2018/07/destroyers-maxed-out-navy-looks-to-new-hulls-power-for-radars-lasers/

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  • Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - May 22, 2019

    May 23, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security, Other Defence

    Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - May 22, 2019

    NAVY Raytheon Co., Fullerton, California, is awarded a $234,640,402 fixed-price-incentive, firm-target contract for the low-rate initial production of 23 Joint Precision Approach and Landing Systems. In addition, this contract procures three production and installation engineering development model unit upgrade kits, engineering change proposals, and associated data. Work will be performed in Fullerton, California (68 percent); Cedar Rapids, Iowa (22 percent); and Indianapolis, Indiana (10 percent), and is expected to be completed in August 2023. Fiscal 2019 other procurement (Navy); and fiscal 2019 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy) funds in the amount of $49,134,484 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation 6.302-1. The Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Maryland, is the contracting activity (N00019-19-C-0020). Raytheon Missile Systems, Tucson, Arizona, is awarded a $151,468,431 firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for integrated logistics support and repairs for the sustainment of the AIM-9X Block II and Block II+ missiles. These services are in support of the Navy, Air Force, and the governments of Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Oman, Malaysia, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program. Work will be performed in Tucson, Arizona (90.7 percent); Cheshire, Connecticut (7 percent); Andover, Massachusetts (0.7 percent); Burlington, Massachusetts (0.6 percent); Heilbronn, Germany (0.5 percent); and various locations within the continental U.S. (0.5 percent), and is expected to be completed in May 2022. 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  • Naval Engineers Must 'Lean In' to Advance Technological Agility

    June 21, 2019 | International, Naval

    Naval Engineers Must 'Lean In' to Advance Technological Agility

    BY C. TODD LOPEZ Rebuilding "strategic momentum" and growing advantages in the maritime domain are challenges Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John M. Richardson addressed in "A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority, Version 2.0," which updated a 2016 document. At an annual meeting of the American Society of Naval Engineers today in Washington, Richardson said meeting those challenges is a "human problem" that must be met, in part by naval engineers. His plan for how the Navy will maintain maritime superiority relies in part on three aspects of agility. "With the joint force, we will restore agility — conceptual, geographic, and technological — to impose cost[s] on our adversaries across the competition-conflict spectrum," the report reads. For engineers, Richardson focused on their contribution to technological agility. "The technological landscape is changing so fast across all of technology," Richardson said. "It's really fueled by this information revolution that we are in the middle of right now. And so as we think about the Navy as a learning engine in and of itself, restoring these technical agilities is really important. We do need to move at pace." For comparison, the admiral referred back to Dec. 8, 1941 — a day after the bombing at Pearl Harbor. It was then, Richardson said, that the Navy began a quick transition from battleship-based tactics to aircraft carriers and aerial battles. He said the switch in strategy wasn't a surprise for the Navy, because it had been researching and engineering for that possibility for years. "We had been 20 years into naval aviation," he said. "This was not just something that we did as a pickup team on Dec. 8. We had been putting investments in with folks like [Joseph] Reeves and [William] Moffett and all those pioneers of naval aviation. We had evidence. A lot of experimentation, a lot of engineering that had gone into that." Now, Richardson said, the Navy must again have that kind of experimentation, engineering and prototyping to ready it for the next conflict — and it must get on that mission quickly to stay ahead of adversaries. "We do not want to be the second navy on the water with these decisive technologies: the directed energy, unmanned, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc., you name it," he said. "That's the great challenge now: to get out, start prototyping, get at this pace, plus evidence ... to yield a relevant Navy that is ready to defend America from attack and protect our interests around the world." The admiral said that a knee-jerk reaction might be to cite Defense Department acquisition regulations, like DOD 5000, for inhibiting the type of rapid development, engineering and research he thinks will be needed to maintain maritime dominance. But he said that's not entirely correct. "I think a new set of rules would help," he said. "But this is, I think, a human problem at the end of the day. If we are all biased for action, if we all lean into this, we will get it done. There is nothing that will prohibit us or inhibit us from getting that done if we are all leaning in." https://www.defense.gov/explore/story/Article/1882567/naval-engineers-must-lean-in-to-advance-technological-agility/

  • EXCLUSIF Défense : le leader français de la vision nocturne va passer sous bannière américaine

    March 4, 2020 | International, C4ISR

    EXCLUSIF Défense : le leader français de la vision nocturne va passer sous bannière américaine

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