McClatchy Newspapers August 14, 2006
Charting a new course: The Navy is set to christen the first of its next generation of warships
By Dave Montgomery
WASHINGTON - The name may not exactly roll off the tongue, but when the Navy christens its first littoral ship next month, it will inaugurate a new breed of warship that Navy leaders say is perfectly tailored to confront the emerging, unconventional threats of the 21st century.
So named because they can navigate shallow coastal waters known as littorals, the new-generation vessels are fast, agile, relatively inexpensive and full of innovations to confront enemies ranging from terrorists to pirates.
"We need this ship in the water yesterday," said retired Adm. Vern Clark, the former chief of Navy operations, who is widely credited with pioneering the concept.
Two versions of the ship - sporting dramatically different hull designs - are being produced by manufacturing teams led by Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. The first - Lockheed Martin's USS Freedom - will be christened Sept. 23 at the Marinette Marine Shipyard in Marinette, Wis.
Hundreds of miles to the southwest, residents of landlocked Fort Worth are already displaying an intense interest in the Navy's latest vessels. City and state officials led by Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, and thousands of grass-roots petitioners are urging the Navy to name one of the new ships the USS Fort Worth.
Navy Secretary Donald Winter will likely select a name late this year or early next year, said his spokeswoman, Capt. Beci Brenton, and Fort Worth boosters have hardly been subtle in making their wishes known. A box containing more than 3,000 postcards was delivered to Winter's office last week, Brenton said.
Granger and other Texas politicians, including Gov. Rick Perry and state legislators from Tarrant County, have also urged Winter to bestow Fort Worth's name on one of the earliest littoral ships.
The next ship awaiting a name, Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) 3, will be built by the Lockheed Martin team beginning next year and is scheduled to be turned over to the Navy in 2009.
"There's tremendous support coming from the Fort Worth community," Brenton said. No other city is waging an organized name-the-ship campaign on the scale of Fort Worth's push, she said.
The ships - the Navy envisions 55 at a possible cost of up to $26 billion - will bear the names of small and medium-size cities. Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a former Fort Worth aerospace executive, named the first two while serving as Navy secretary before being promoted last year.
Telling his staff that he wanted the initial vessels to reflect the noble symbols of America as well as the names of cities, England named the first ship Freedom, after at least 10 cities.
The second ship, now under construction by the General Dynamics team, is called Independence, the name of President Truman's hometown in Missouri, as well as several other cities.
Littoral ships took root during England's tenure as Navy secretary in President Bush's first term. Clark, who served with England as chief of naval operations, is largely credited with the idea and worked closely with England and other Navy officials to promote the concept in Congress.
The program has had generally robust support in Congress but has recently encountered growing scrutiny because projected per-unit costs are exceeding original estimates, in some cases by as much as 30 percent. The Senate Appropriations Committee recently recommended funding only one of the two ships requested for fiscal 2007 and rescinded funds for one of the three ships procured in 2006.
Navy officials said the rescission does not affect construction of the next unnamed ship and expressed confidence that the program will overcome cost problems and remain on track. The Congressional Research Service predicts that cost estimates could rise from about $223 million to nearly $300 million for each ship when the program reaches full production, but Navy officials insist that the price tag still constitutes a good buy compared with other acquisition programs.
"There's a lot of appeal about what it can do," said Navy Cmdr. Joe Chiaravallotti, the Navy's littoral combat ship section head.
"Its concept is new and foreign to anything we've ever done before, and ... that, by its very nature, causes controversy. Until we put these ships out in numbers, that controversy is going to be there."
Independent analysts tend to give the program high marks, even with the increasing concern over cost. "The littoral ship is the star of the Navy's shipbuilding program," said Loren Thompson with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va., says the ship will be "fiendishly fast" and "certainly seems like a good idea right now."
But yet to be tested, he said, is how its unusual design will handle in rough waters.
"The crews aren't going to do you much good if they're all barfing," he said.
With the emergence of new threats after 9-11, Clark and other Navy leaders pushed for a light, high-speed ship that could ply shallow waters off-limits to larger, more conventional ships. Clark also wanted a ship that could be produced much faster than the normal cycle, which typically spans years.
"I didn't think we had the right kind of force structure to deal with the threats and challenges we were going to face in the 21st century," Clark said in a recent telephone interview.
Potential adversaries in the coastal environment, he said, could include "pirates, terrorists, who knows. You don't know if you're not there, and that's the whole point."
One of the most striking features of the emerging line of ships is what the Navy describes as "plug and play." The ships can be easily refitted for new missions with modules that enable it to switch between three main tasks - mine warfare, anti-submarine warfare and surface combat.
They will be equipped with unmanned air and sea drones, an attack helicopter and smaller watercraft. Littorals are also designed to reduce - though not completely eliminate - detection by radar.
With a core crew of 40 and a maximum of 75, depending on the mission, the ships will be able to skip across the water at 50 knots, almost 58 mph, far faster than destroyers and aircraft carriers.
The Lockheed version features a monohull patterned after an Italian powerboat that set a trans-Atlantic speed record; the General Dynamics vessel features a trihull configuration called a trimaran.
The Navy awarded the contract in May 2004, selecting teams led by Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems & Sensors of Moorestown, N.J., and General Dynamics and its subsidiary, Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine.
General Dynamics-designed ships are built in Mobile, Ala., by Austal USA, a subsidiary of Australian shipbuilder Austal Ships. The Lockheed version is being alternately built at Marinette Marine and Bollinger Shipyards of Louisiana.
The Navy gave the program to two contracting teams to encourage competition, potentially reducing costs, and to help invigorate the struggling shipbuilding industry, according to Navy officials and analysts. The Navy also wanted to benefit from two "very good designs," Chiaravallotti said.
Chiaravallotti said the Navy will stay with two contractors at least until fiscal 2009 and will decide whether to keep the status quo or "down-select" to only one. The Navy expects to reach optimum production of six ships a year between 2009 and 2011.
Navy officials have chosen San Diego as home port for the first four littoral ships and have not indicated where others will be based. In addition to the team members and major subcontractors, the program will generate billions of dollars in business for smaller subcontractors and suppliers across the country.
The USS Freedom, which is still unfinished, will be christened by Birgit Smith, the widow of a U.S. soldier slain in Iraq. England, when he was Navy secretary, named her the ship's sponsor after her husband, 1st Sgt. Paul R. Smith, posthumously received the Medal of Honor for defending fellow soldiers in a 2003 firefight near the Baghdad Airport.
With the traditional smash of a champagne bottle, the 377-foot-long hull will splash sideways into the Menominee River. After construction is complete in June, the Freedom will head toward Lake Michigan on a journey that will eventually take it into the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, and ultimately to its home port on the Pacific.
The Navy expects to put it in operation in spring 2008. For Clark, who now lives in retirement in Arizona, its deployment will convert a years-long vision into reality.
"This is the way we think the future will look like," he said.
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram news researchers Adam Barth and Marcia Melton contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2006, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
