Blog Notes

It will be a slow week on the blog. My wife is out of town this week for family reasons, and my time is very limited so far as I attempt to be super dad. Expect less analysis and more current events for the next few days.

Black Sea News Update

There is a bit of news regarding fleet movements in the Black Sea.

A non-combatant US ship steamed through the Turkish Straits yesterday, heading toward the Black Sea, only hours after one of two US Navy ships that last month transited the Turkish Straits to carry humanitarian aid to Georgia sailed back through the straits toward the Mediterranean late on Monday.

The article goes on to detail the movements.

US Embassy Press Attaché Kathryn Schalow told Today's Zaman yesterday that the USS Mount Whitney "should pass through the straits soon," without specifying an exact date for passage of the ship. Schalow also confirmed yesterday earlier wire reports that a US naval vessel passed through the Turkish Straits to reach the Black Sea.

"The ship's name is the USNS Pathfinder, and it is a non-combatant ship used for oceanographic surveys. It is in the Black Sea upon a request from the Department of Underwater Heritage of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine for a joint demonstration of this ship's survey capability," Schalow said.

If it wasn't for Georgia, nobody in the world would care (including us), but the article gives a good sense of the intense political focus the naval activity has within the politics of Turkey.

Five Good Reads

Bubblehead is talking about the early delivery of PCU New Hampshire (SSN 778). For those who read this blog because you are interested in submarine related content, the last paragraph is a must read.

Norman Polmar is discussing the Navy's leadership, or the ineptitude of leadership with surface combatants in shipbuilding. It is a very good read, Norman is being nice though, I read that piece thinking he held some opinions back.

David Axe is talking about the DDG-1000 confusion. He is braver than I am. I have tried how many times now to bring up the discussion that began with that July 31 hearing, and every time I think I get it all figured out a new story pops up online. David does the smart thing though, he interviews Bob Work. As I highlighted back in July, the plan the Navy has come out with to build more Burke's sounds very similar to Bob's report "Know When To Hold Them, Know When To Fold Them".

Fabius Maximus picks up on one of the phrases we promote on the blog, or more accurately, a premise I first read forwarded by Robert Farley of which I very much agree with. “Amphibious Ships are the Dreadnoughts of the modern maritime era” done in the Fabius Maximus discussion format. Very cool.

The Naval Institute has made available an article by Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter called An Affordable Global Presence. Read it. It is a future discussion, but should be promoted broadly first. There are about 10 ways to expand that discussion.

Photo caption: CHUUK, Federated States of Micronesia (Aug. 31, 2008) The Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19) is anchored off the coast of Weno Island, supporting Pacific Partnership 2008. Pacific Partnership in support of and in cooperation with the government of the Federated States of Micronesia, partner nations including representatives from India and Canada and many non-governmental organizations.

Roughead Finally Gives an Interview

Finally, almost a year after apparently beginning the process to cancel the DDG-1000, Admiral Roughead has actually discussed the issue himself instead of through a proxy. We take the quotes one at a time.

"I started looking at the DDG-1000. It has a lot of technology, but it cannot perform broader, integrated air and missile defense," Roughead said in his first interview since the controversial move to cancel the destroyer program.

I have mixed feelings on this, because the last sentence is a very troubling fact. On one side I commend Admiral Roughead for working within his means to cancel the DDG-1000. On the other hand though, if the environment in the Navy today is such that the Chief of Naval Operations can't be out front and champion a message of shipbuilding, the most important issue facing the Navy today... something is clearly broken. If your thinking "ya, but, this is a political reality..." then it isn't just the Navy that is broken.

Roughead also noted that design compromises resulted in the removal of some of its torpedoes, making it more vulnerable to submarines.

"Submarines can get very close, and it does not have the ability to take on that threat," Roughead said.

If we are worried about how close submarines can get to the DDG-1000, then we just invalidated the entire argument for a technology demonstrator for stealth ships. Stealth isn't just low observability, it is also about the evading detection from submarines. If stealth cannot do both, then what are we really demonstrating here with the hull form, the part of the ship that makes it so expensive?

This is such a silly argument though. If the Navy is facing a major submarine threat and is looking to build a ship to counter that threat in blue water, then what are we building the Littoral Combat Ship for? In no time in maritime history has any Navy ever built battleships to fight submarines. I will be picking up this topic later this week if time permits, because to be blunt and honest, the CNO should never be quoted by a major newspaper with such generic nonsense, that is what his underlings are for.

"If you go back, from the end of Vietnam to our present time, we have only shot about a thousand bullets," he said. "And I look at the world and I see proliferation of missiles, I see proliferation of submarines. And that is what we have to deal with."

In other words, the Navy has decided Naval Ship Gunfire Support is no longer a requirement. We sure have spent a lot of time debating otherwise, not to mention money in pursuit of the option, to just dismiss it based on its relative absence during a six decade time period where a US Navy ship never shot down a single missile. Comparing 1000 "bullets" to 0 anti-ship missile kills doesn't favor his argument.

Roughead is not taking a bad position, he is just making a terrible argument. Again, if the CNO is going to only do a single public interview a year on shipbuilding, make it count.

But he was less enthusiastic about building a third ship. The Navy agreed to the additional vessel because money was already in the current budget proposal, he said.

"It will be another ship with which to demonstrate the technologies," he said. "But it still will lack the capabilities that I think will be in increased demand in the future."

Finally, something said with meaning and purpose. The necessity of a third DDG-1000 is industrial, thus political, not strategic. Someone in Congress should reconcile why Raytheon and the Navy say two different things about the capabilities of the DDG-1000. Here is what I want to know... will the Navy be funding the Standard missile support for the DBR anyway? I assume this is being cut from the Navy budget right? And both Congress and the Senate has approved this?

Why does it matter? The decision is huge, it determines whether the Navy will always be AEGIS, or if we introduce competition into our systems. If shipbuilding wasn't so broken already, this type of thing would have the look, feel, and smell of corruption. That might offend the Navy or Lockheed Martin, but competition was one reason for open architecture in the first place.

"I am doing everything I can to increase the capability and capacity of the fleet," Roughead said. "Shipbuilding dominates my thinking."

Then answer a few easy questions. Why do you refuse to criticize the 313? Why do you refuse to make the cost efficient argument against the DDG-1000 when it is the most credible argument to be made. Where is the link between the Navy's ends and ways strategic concept and the means of shipbuilding in the context of strategy? Why all the bashing of the DDG-1000 out of context? If shipbuilding dominates your thinking, and is the most important discussion for the Navy today, why do you avoid talking to the press about it except for this one time?

And one last question... Why are we building the entire surface combatant fleet around a single operational requirement, namely ballistic missile defense? My read of maritime strategy when taking a historic view suggests that emphasis on a single capability has long been proven time and time again as a flawed approach.

Two More Puzzle Pieces for DDG-1000 Standard Missiles

Defense Daily does such a good job, and today we have one more example. From Monday's Defense Watch, which is available every week on in CHINFO Clips.

To Build Or Not To Build. The DDG-1000 2004 JROC-approved Operational Requirements Document clearly states, "DDX will establish local air superiority using the SM-2 family of Surface to Air Missiles." This capability is included in the requirements and design of the DDG-1000 today, a Raytheon spokesperson tells Defense Daily. Overall, at baseline configuration, the Zumwalt Dual Band Radar (DBR) has 37 percent better performance than a SPY-1 D in a blue water AAW environment and 50 percent better performance in a littoral environment, the spokesperson says. "Further, the Zumwalt radar suite is specifically designed for capability growth for the emerging BMD mission. This is achieved by simply 'fully populating' the array faces with additional electronics," the spokesperson adds. "The most affordable and quickest path to upgrade to even more superior AAW and BMD is via the completion of the DDG-1000 TSCE-based mission equipment. Our estimate is that it would be about one-quarter the cost of upgrading the DDG-51 system and would result in 200+ percent more capability for BMD."

...Standard Missiles. "As previously stated, Zumwalt mission equipment was designed to accommodate the SM-2 family of missiles and is therefore easily scalable to accommodate the SM-3 and SM-6," the spokesperson notes. "Traditionally, [the Navy] funds the ships-side of a weapon for the ship-side of the interface and missile-side of the weapon for the missile-side of the interface. Confusion arises when interface changes to the S-2 family of missiles are attributed to the ship-side." The missile interface changes required are known and "costed," the spokesperson adds. "The cost to modify the missile for Zumwalt is approximately four times less than redesigning the DDG-51 radar, C2 and significant HM&E modifications which are represented in the modernization budgets."

...Missile Integration. "The U.S. Navy-initiated technology study, TI-37, concluded in 2003/04 that the SM-6 could be integrated into the TSCE-based mission system at relatively low cost to either the ship system or the missile, due to the flexibility of the DDG-1000 open architecture," the spokesperson says. "In February 2008, a detailed technical paper was presented showing a clear path to the integration of the SM-3 missile into DDG-1000 with only minor changes due to the open architecture flexibility built into the DDG-1000. All of this data was delivered to the [Navy] in a non-proprietary form per the requirements of the DDG-1000 program."

Also check out August 2008 Seapower Magazine article BMD Boost. Second paragraph of the article.

A program to incorporate improved BMD into all of the DDG 51 guided-missile destroyers has been added to the established cruiser-destroyer modernization program.

This article was released before the July 31st hearing, just barely, meaning when the Navy suggested the new DDG 51s would be BMD capable just like the modernizations, they forgot to tell the rest of us the modernization program for the DDG-51s has changed and now includes BMD.

That July 31st hearing was such a mess, wouldn't it be nice if we could just get all the information in one place with clarity, instead of having to look everywhere to piece it all together.

One thing is clear, this blog is still struggling to talk about BMD based on the July 31st hearing in a way that is completely, 100% accurate. Everything to date has been discussion without all the information.