Cost and design bugs could sink new destroyer program

WASHINGTON

For more than a decade, sailors and officers in the Navy's surface force have been hearing about an odd-looking, high-tech destroyer that would usher in a new era for the fleet and dramatically change their service.

The DDG 1000 series of ships would run on quiet and compact electric motors, not today's gas turbine engines. The ships would be unusually large but built with a radar-evading profile to make them appear small, and they would carry a new gun able to hit precisely targets 50 miles or more inland.

Most important for sailors, the destroyers would carry highly trained, computer-savvy crews half as large as the force on current destroyers.

As recently as early June, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer reaffirmed the Bush

administration's support for the new ships. But as Congress refines spending plans for 2009 this summer, Navy leaders appear ready to abandon the DDG 1000 program, building only two destroyers for what once was seen as a force of two dozen or more.

The House of Representatives already has voted for at least a pause in DDG 1000 purchases, citing the cost - as much as $5 billion each - of the first two ships in the series and their dependence on still-unproven technologies.

In a statement released last week, the Navy seemed resigned to an early end for the program. "Even if we do not receive funding... beyond the first two ships, the technology embedded in DDG 1000 will advance the Navy's future," the statement asserted.

"It's pretty clear that unless there's a major surprise, the class will stop at two ships," said Robert Work, a retired Marine officer and defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Along with cost issues, new evidence that the ships aren't large enough or can't be configured to hold missile-defense radars sought by the administration has undermined the destroyer, he said.

The DDG 1000 was conceived as a successor to the Navy's Arleigh Burke class of destroyers, the current mainstay of the surface fleet. Though far less sophisticated than the new ships, the Burke destroyers are far cheaper, at less than

$2 billion each, and still are regarded as the world's premier surface combatants.

The DDG 1000's likely demise may provide a new measure of job security for hundreds of surface sailors and officers. Navy leaders once saw the destroyer's computer-controlled systems as a replacement for 150 or more sailors per ship; they expected to use billions of dollars saved on salaries and benefits to pay for more new ships and labor-saving technologies.

The projected savings have all but disappeared, however. Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations, wrote last month that "cost savings associated with DDG 1000's smaller crew... are largely offset by higher estimated maintenance costs for this significantly more complex ship."

Limiting the DDG 1000 series to two ships - a total of seven were in the Navy's most recent plan - frees up enough construction money for eight more Arleigh Burke destroyers, according to a Navy estimate. At 330 sailors per ship, that translates into more than 2,600 additional Navy jobs.

Of course, other jobs - those of civilian shipbuilders in New England and on the Gulf Coast - may be lost if the DDG 1000 program ends. That's a particular concern to lawmakers facing re-election, such as Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, whose state is home to a shipyard building the new destroyer.

Close to 100,000 industrial jobs in 48 states could be harmed if the program ends, Collins and Virginia Sen. John Warner said in a July 10 letter to Navy leaders.

Work and other analysts said the destroyer program's fate also raises questions about the future of a planned cruiser, the CGX, that was to use the DDG 1000's distinctive, wave-cutting hull design.

"A key selling point was the common hull," said Loren Thompson, president of the Lexington Institute, a defense consulting firm. If the DDG 1000 hull can't accommodate the radars needed for the planned national missile defense system, he said, "I suspect we're headed toward a complete rethink of surface combatant modernization."

Cost will be central to that analysis. A series of studies ordered by Congress have raised bipartisan concern that the Navy has crafted a shipbuilding plan that the nation can't afford, particularly given the continuing cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And if the shipbuilding program is unaffordable, critics warn, the inevitable result is a fleet that shrinks to far fewer than the 313 ships the service insists it needs.

Growing concern about the cost and availability of fuel also is pushing an effort by some in Congress to make the CGX nuclear-powered. That would almost certainly add to the ship's initial cost, though proponents say it could be cheaper in the long run.

Along with DDG 1000 and CGX, the Navy is developing a new series of aircraft carriers, the first of which will cost more than $10 billion, and is struggling to rein in the cost of a new littoral combat ship.

"The fact that we have missed our forecasting costs in the past has brought our credibility into question," Roughead acknowledged last spring.

But limiting the DDG 1000 series to two ships also may raise questions about the Navy's fiscal management.

Retired Vice Adm. Tim LaFleur, who served as the Navy's top surface warfare officer from 2001 to 2005, said the DDG 1000's distinctive design and operating systems will require the service to maintain special supply lines and training programs for sailors for decades. Such expenses routinely are spread across a long line of ships but are harder to justify when just two are involved, he said.

Because of those costs, the Navy probably would offer few objections if Congress decided to cancel the DDG 1000 program completely, Work said.

Still, the service can realize substantial long-term value out of just a two-ship class, he added, by using the DDG 1000s as platforms to test new technologies. They may also allow the Navy to determine finally whether a large, complex warship can be manned effectively by a small crew, a point of debate in naval circles for years.

In the 1950s, Work recalled, the Navy planned a line of "hunter-killer cruisers" to patrol the north Atlantic and ward off Soviet submarines. The ships were to be loaded with sensitive sonars and new, homing torpedoes, but they proved so expensive that only one, the Norfolk, was constructed.

The Navy got nearly two decades of service out of the Norfolk, which was retired in 1970. An attack submarine now bears the city's name.

Dale Eisman, (703) 913-9872, dale.eisman@pilotonline.com