30 juillet 2020 | International, Naval
By: Sen. David Perdue
Right now, the world is more dangerous than any time in my lifetime. The United States faces five major threats: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and terrorism. We face those threats across five domains: air, land, sea, cyberspace and space.
The U.S. Navy is one of the most effective tools we as a country have to maintain peace and stability around the world. Today, however, the Navy is in danger of being surpassed in capability by our near-peer competitors. On top of that, our competitors are becoming even more brazen in their attempts to challenge our Navy every day.
To address this, the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act called for a 355-ship Navy to be built as soon as possible. This effort is extremely expensive: $31 billion per year for 30 years. This can't be funded by new debt. We must reallocate resources to fund this priority.
It is unclear at this time whether we will be able to achieve this goal, however, because Washington politicians have failed to provide consistent funding to our shipbuilding enterprise over the years.
The last two Democratic presidents reduced military spending by 25 percent. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did it. Also, since 1975, Congress has only funded the government on time on four occasions due to our broken budget process. As a result, Congress forces the military in most years to operate under continuing resolutions, which further restricts the Navy's efforts to rebuild.
These shortsighted decisions by Washington have had draconian effects on our military readiness. They have decimated our industrial supplier base and severely damaged critical supply chains.
According to a 2018 report from the Pentagon, the entire Department of Defense lost over 20,000 U.S.-based industrial suppliers from 2000 to 2018.
This means that, today, many shipbuilding components have just one U.S.-based supplier, and others are entirely outsourced to other countries.
This is one of the reasons why it is doubtful that we can reach 355 ships unless major changes are made immediately. If we don't strengthen our industrial supplier base, there is simply no way to scale up ship production and maintenance capabilities to meet the requirements of a 355-ship fleet.
The Department of Defense has not yet released this year's 30-year shipbuilding plan as required by law, and time is running out to reach the Navy's most recent projection of a 355-ship fleet by 2034.
However, even if the Department of Defense has a solid, achievable plan to only reach 355 ships, I am skeptical that it will be enough. I am skeptical because America's biggest long-term challenge, China, is already running laps around us on shipbuilding.
The Chinese Navy has 350 ships today, compared to our 300. By 2034, China is projected to have more than 425 ships. Even if we reached 355 ships, we would still have a 70-ship disadvantage, at the least.
On top of that, because of the range restrictions in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which just ended in 2019, China has surpassed, or “out-sticked,” us in some missile capabilities as well.
There are several steps we can take to respond to these developments. For starters, we need to place greater emphasis on funding our shipbuilding enterprise. Also, we need to rebuild our industrial supply chains through consistent, robust funding and by eliminating continuing resolutions.
This year's NDAA takes critical steps to ensure we can keep up with our near-peer competitors and keep our country safe. It authorizes an increase of more than $1 billion for the construction of new submarines, destroyers and amphibious dock ships. It invests hundreds of millions of dollars to support our industrial supplier base.
However, more work remains to be done in the coming years. We need to dramatically build up our Navy beyond 355 ships to ensure that the American-led free world can continue.
President Teddy Roosevelt once said that “a good Navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guarantee of peace.” If we don't continue ramping up our shipbuilding enterprise right now, the world that we will be passing on to our children and grandchildren will only continue to grow more dangerous.
Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., is the chairman of the Seapower Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
3 décembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial
The AI-driven personnel management system “was the equivalent of having one extra body in that department, saving them approximately 1,000 hours a year."
12 juillet 2018 | International, Naval
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. 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/
6 janvier 2024 | International, Terrestre
Opinion: The DoD is awake. It has realized new and escalating threats require rapid change, or we may not prevail in the next conflict.