DDG 1000 sinks itself, and the old acquisition paradigm

It seems as if the U.S. Navy is now admitting that the DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer program is a failure. It appears as if Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations, has decided that the money spent on DDG 1000 would purchase too few hulls, in spite of each ship’s impressive capability, to accomplish the Navy’s assigned missions. The Navy will now propose limiting the Zumwalt program to two ships, basically making the program a research and development technology demonstration effort. The Navy hopes to apply what it learns from these two ships to the CG(X) program, the next generation of cruisers.

This story from last week’s Defense News fills in some details:

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead "holds his cards real close," said one Congressional source. "But read the body language. He knows he's in trouble with the DDG 1000s. That ship is going to cost anywhere from $1.5 billion to $3 billion more than advertised. And when that happens there's no slush fund. The only billpayer is Navy shipbuilding."

The Navy, said the congressional source, needs to protect other programs such as submarine and littoral combat ships from being cut to pay for potential DDG 1000 cost overruns.

Instead of the big destroyer, the Navy also hopes to protect the CG(X) cruiser, a bigger combatant designed to protect aircraft carrier battle groups and provide ballistic missile defense. Roughead, the Congressional source said, "has his eyes on the cruiser. He's trying to make sure that ship is a national asset," the source said.

But the cruiser won't be ready to build anytime soon. Navy plans officially call for the
first ship to be funded in 2011, but no design has been chosen and leaders admit the CG(X) will be delayed - at least to 2015, some say, and maybe beyond.

Commentary

With the DDG 1000 having failed and CG(X) at least a decade away, what will be the Navy’s shipbuilding plan? The only choice is to march into the past. The Navy will choose to build more DDG 51s, the successful Burke-class destroyer. It will also refit and extend the service life of older DDG 51s, and do the same for the existing Ticonderoga-class cruisers. By taking these steps, the Navy will hope to have a sufficient number of ships to meet mission requirements for the next decade or so.

But the failure of the DDG 1000 program, along with the tenuous future of CG(X), means that the Navy now has no surface combatant ship-building plan for the year 2020 and beyond. More fundamentally, the failure of DDG 1000 has shown that introducing new classes of warships to replace old classes serving the same function has reached a fatal limit. Weapon system costs have grown much faster than either the U.S. economy or the Defense Department’s funding base. Furthermore, improved quality can no longer substitute for quantity, especially for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force, which have widely dispersed geographical responsibilities. The Air Force reached it limit with the B-2 and F-22 programs. The quality-for-quantity trade-off paradigm has now collapsed for the Navy with the DDG 1000 program.

So what now? Admiral Roughead’s termination of DDG 1000 has created a cultural crisis for the Navy. There will not be a successor to the Burke-class of destroyers. And the Navy must face the very real possibility that there will not be an affordable replacement for its existing cruiser fleet. And if the Navy doesn’t know what its surface combatant force will look like in 2030, what ships will be there to protect its aircraft carrier force? The U.S. Navy seems to have an elemental problem.

But this crisis also creates an opportunity for the Navy to fundamentally rethink how it can realistically accomplish its missions after 2020. Technology will clearly be a major part of the solution. But the answer may be technology that is distributed among many small, dispersed, and networked robotic platforms rather than technology that is concentrated in a very small number of grand, yet traditional, ships. And as the Air Force contemplates how it will get by after 2020 with 20 B-2 bombers and 183 F-22s, it too should find something attractive about a contrasting vision of quantity, dispersion, and networked robotics.

Decades ago, a few defense planners forecast the day when some weapons would get too expensive to afford. For Admiral Roughead, that day has arrived. Leaders in the Air Force must realize it too. It is now time for leaders in both services to break with the past.


POSTSCRIPT

See this article by Mr. John Christie, a former senior Pentagon acquisition official, which explains why U.S. DoD aircraft and warship acquisition trends are unsustainable.

See Information Dissemination for more discussion of DDG 1000 news.