VADM DONNELLY: I’d like to call our panelists up to take their seats, please. I’d like you to just look at this group here. This is an incredibly talented group. I was talking with retired Vice Admiral Paul Sullivan in the back of the room earlier, and he said the submarine force values their acquisition professionals’ community more than any other group in the Navy.
From my experience – and I’ll go through the bios briefly of these people before they speak – but from my experience we hand pick about three a year to go into this community. The decision is made jointly by Naval Reactors because they sign off on all personnel decisions, and both force commanders. We look at each commanding officer and we say, alright, these guys are going to be really important to the future of the submarine force. Let’s pick the right ones, and we pick three a year. Typically, one of those three will be promoted to flag officer several years later after they’ve done tours as a program manager and a major program manager. So it’s a very careful and deliberate selection. The
other communities don’t get it the same way we do.
The plan, which I have not discussed with anybody here, is that I’ll make a brief introduction and then I’m going to ask you to speak for three to five minutes about your program. Then we’re going to open it to you all for questions. The program managers here represent a great cross section of all the programs that matter to the submarine force. So for the audience, this is your opportunity to really throw some fast balls at them and see how they do.
In no particular order, Captain Mike Stevens on my left is the pro-gram manager for the Virginia-class submarine, PMS450. He served in command while I was the commander of submarine forces and I got to know him quite well. He was the CO of USS New Hampshire, SSN778. That was the very first Virginia-class submarine to make an overseas deployment. It set a record, which still stands, for the shortest period from the time of delivery of the ship to deployment overseas. His ship won the Battle Efficiency E the very first year he was eligible to win that award, quite an accomplishment of command.
Prior to command he had a whole series of operational assignments USS Texas, Kamehameha, Alaska and San Francisco. He also served on Capitol Hill and was in the N87 Submarine Warfare Directorate at OPNAV and was also on the Naval Propulsion Examining Board. That’s Mike Stevens.
We also have Cory Jackson. Cory is a Naval Academy 1990 gradu ate. He had a number of similar career pattern assignments on the Henry M Jackson and Pennsylvania.
His ship won the Battle E while he was on Pennsylvania. Then he went to be XO on Corpus Christi in Guam, where the ship won two Bat tle E’s. And then he went on to be the commanding officer of the USS Alaska, where that ship won the Battle E and the Omaha trophy as the best strategic ballistic missile submarine in the fleet.
He then transitioned to acquisition professional. You can kind of see the pattern here. Really top performing COs that are picked to go run our major programs. He is now the PMS425 program manager for combat and weapons control systems.
Captain John Newton, Naval Academy class of 1991, commander of USS Maryland. He also served on Simon Bolivar and Topeka and USS Memphis and USS San Juan and USS Scranton. You just kept doing it until you got it right. He is the program manager of PMS399, the SOF undersea mobility program, so dry deck shelters, advanced SEAL deliv ery systems all fall into his purview.
We have Meganne Atkins. She is PMS435 program manager for submarine electromagnetic systems. She has had a range of program manager assignments and was also stationed at the Naval Undersea Weapons Center at Newport, Rhode Island. So we’re looking forward to hearing from her on that.
She was the small business innovation research lead for Virgin ia-class submarines and there are probably several of your small busi ness customers in this audience. This is your opportunity. Also, deputy program manager for non-propulsion electronic systems (NPES) for Vir ginia-class submarines and was the technical director for the advanced development in IWS-5. She fleeted up to her current position from the deputy program manager position.
Then finally, it was going to be Admiral Goggins, but Admiral Gog gins got pulled away so he sent Scott Pappano. Scott is PMS392, pro gram manager for in-service strategic and attack submarines, so he is the program manager after delivery of the submarine that looks over both our SSBNs and our fast attacks. Again, a Naval Academy graduate of 1989 and then he served on a variety of operational assignments. He somehow found time to go earn a Master’s degree at MIT. We’re pleased to have you. He is also one of our award winners that you’ll see at the awards luncheon tomorrow, where he won the J. Guy Reynolds award for excellence in submarine acquisition.
Why don’t I start with John and we’ll work this way? If you could give me three to five minutes, just say a few words about your program, and then we’ll turn it loose for questions.
CAPT JOHN NEWTON JR.: Thanks, sir. What I would first say is, Admiral Donnelly, thanks a lot for the chance to visit with you today. I have memories of Admiral Donnelly – we served together when I was a young JO in ’87. Several years later when I was in command and he was SUBLANT, he rode my ship when I was on Maryland, and that’s one of my cherished memories, getting a chance to salute you as you left my ship after our time together. It’s great to be back and visit with you all today.
I am your SOF (Special Operation Forces) undersea mobility pro gram manager and I support all six dry deck shelters. We’re dual-spon sored through both SOCOM and OPNAV-N97, and we maintain the Na vy’s inventory. We maintain the six shelters and the Navy’s SOCOM undersea mobility inventory. At this time, the four SSGNs are our pri mary users. We also have six Virginia-class submarines in the DDS Host Submarine inventory (4 primary and 2 backup).
It’s a great office. I’ve been blessed in this job. We get great support from SOCOM and from OPNAV-N97. Clockwise from the top left, I’ll talk a little bit about all these pictures.
At the top left you’ll see an SSGN going to sea with dual shelters installed. You’ll see SEAL and Navy divers operating in a flooded dry
deck shelter. Think of it like an underwater garage. We can egress divers in and out, in a mass swimmer lock out mode with all their SOF peculiar gear and we can host SEAL Delivery Vehicles (SDV). We can do some forms of Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUV), such as the REMUS ve hicles and some man portable units. As we get deeper into the POM, we will also be supporting larger UUVs and other submersibles for both SOCOM and Navy customers.
Go to the right and we’ II see the USS New Hampshire, heading to sea with a dry deck shelter. We’re working with SOCOM and the Navy to figure out the right way to transition from the SSGN to the Virginia-class host over the next few years. It’s an interesting part of the problem and we look forward to growing that capacity.
You can see an SDV heading out to sea in the middle tier. In the middle tier on the right you’ll see a very exciting program we’re working now. It’s a cartoon, but there are actually parts of that that are prototyped now.
There’s our DDS modernization program. We’re working with Oceaneering and Electric Boat and a big team of government facilities. We’ve had support since 2015, our first contract award. We’re getting past our design review now, and this is going to give us some pretty exciting stuff.
We’re going to make it 50 inches longer and providing the capabil ity to hold about 30 percent more volume, both longitudinally and also through reconfiguring the interior arrangement. It will give us almost 300 percent more weight capacity when complete. We are providing greatly increased capability and options for the force and I’m very fortu nate to help this program mature.
Finally, we support the Navy and PMS-450, the attack submarine office, as they work with the TSEP program that you saw some elements of before as they work to reconstitute SOF or account for SOF, and we’re happy to support that effort. The last picture you see on the bottom is our large UUV, Mobile Anti-Submarine Training Target (MASTT). We are not the only leader in Navy unmanned undersea vehicles, but we cer tainly support this effort and we’re proud to work with the MASTT and other UUV programs.
That’s an effort I work in partnership with NUWC in Washington. They manage that force on Coronado Island, and it has done great work. It models a diesel submarine.
I’m very proud to report our first ever interaction of MASTT with a submarine in shared water space this year. I look forward to further developing this capability forward as we work through the POM.
CAPT MICHAEL STEVENS: It’s good to be here with all of you again. It’s great to see so many familiar faces. The Virginia-class pro gram is really excelling and it’s a credit to the shipbuilders. When you think about where we were in the middle of the ’90s, we almost stopped building submarines for a little bit. It was sad times, right?
Today, we’re delivering two a year and delivering two very fine ships a year. I get to ride the alpha trials with Admiral Caldwell, of course, leading it. It’s a great pleasure to ride those ships.
Just the other day I was walking the dry dock for the Washington post-shakedown availability. I can attest to you that that ship is in the best material condition of any Virginia-class submarine we’ve ever built.
I probably would stretch that to any submarine ever, but that might be too far.
It’s in excellent shape, a really phenomenal submarine. The ship builders really should be congratulated for getting up to that kind of pace that we’re on today. The ships, too, I can attest firsthand are phenomenal in terms of their acoustic superiority.
We’re doing some big things going forward, including the Virginia Payload Module which Admiral Selby just talked about. The design of that is going very well and we think we’re in good position to insert that increased capability into the next block. That will really take these ships to the next level and replace the SSGNs as they go away, recapitalizing that strike capability that we’re going to lose when the SSGNs retire.
And then we’re tied closely with N97’s Tactical Submarine Evalua tion Program. I think that’s a great program that we’re looking forward to, after we get started with Block 5, beginning to look how we can insert in a more incremental fashion even greater capability and technology. So we have some really interesting and exciting things we’re working on, that I can’t really enumerate here in this particular forum. But stay tuned because I think that there’s some really cool things coming about to make these submarines even better if that’s even possible. I don’t know that it is.
I would like to also say that the last two ships, the John Warner and the Illinois, so the SSN 785 and 786, we completed their post-shake down availabilities. We contracted with the shipbuilders to do it in six months. They both completed ahead of schedule and we’re on a target to get down to three months PSA.
It’s something Admiral Tofalo really pressed upon me. We were at the christening of the Washington. It’s supposed to be a happy time,just drinking orange juice or whatever, and I got cornered about how we’re not getting those boats out fast enough.
So we put our foot on the gas pedal and we pressed on the post-shake down availabilities to get those shortened so that we can get these very fine submarines out to the fleet faster. It’s such an advantage for the crew, to come through all those trials, and it has done so much to get up to speed. They go through the acoustic trials, the weapons systems ac ceptance trials, and they’re really at a fine point in terms of proficiency.
And then to just go into a short post-shakedown availability and march right into their fleet readiness training program is really advanta geous to the fleet. It keeps the crew kind of in one piece, so they don’t break up after a long post-shakedown availability. And again, that has been made possible by the exceptional work that our two shipbuilders, and all the vendors who support them, do. So we do need to step back and pause and congratulate ourselves. I see some fine work and it’s re ally exciting to be a part of it.
Really quickly I want to address a question. Virginia-class does not have a turning radius problem. It is an excellent ship in terms of turning radius. We have designed the VPM to account for its length. Admiral Selby’s folks have looked at that in depth and it is incorporated in the design and it is within our performance parameters. So it’s a fine addi tion and I think you’ll be very pleased when we actually get that out to the fleet.
With that, that’s probably more than five minutes, I don’t know. CAPT B. CORY JACKSON: Thanks for the opportunity to be here.
The main product that my program office delivers is the AN/BYG-1 Combat Control System, which has two halves, as reflected in the name of the program office. The two sides are the combat control side and the weapons control side. The combat control or the fire control, tradition ally just like you would remember probably from some of your days on the ship, is taking data from sonar and turning it into tracks that we can use to put weapons on target. That’s the other half of the system, the weapons control system.
With the weapons control system we have started a transition. We actually have our first contract called the Payload Control System, and we’re expanding the definition of weapons to include all payloads that can be handled by the submarine. We’ve already done some of that.
We’ve gone beyond traditional torpedoes. We have integrated the Tomahawk strike software. We don’t use dedicated servers that once were needed to do strike onboard. We basically take the software, we virtualize it, and it’s integrated directly into the AN/BYG-1 system.
We’ve done the same thing with the navigation system developed by IWS-6, the VMS system. Those programs are virtualized and run on our servers and our displays and operated in the control room seamlessly.
It’s all part of the Submarine Warfare Federated Tactical System, the sys tem-of-systems that includes both my program, Meganne’s program, and CAPT Rich Arnold, who is not here, with PMS-401 and ARCI for sonar.
The other exciting thing that comes along with SWFTS is — one of the key pieces at the center of all this is our Enclave Guard System. We handle data at many different classification levels and we don’t have the room onboard to do multiple networks that are redundant, because of the space limitations onboard a submarine. So we handle that information assurance problem through the use of an Enclave Guard, and that’s part of my system as well.
Lastly, we’ve started — when I was mentioning payloads — we’re standing by with the payload control system to be the receiver of pay loads that are mature and ready for integration. One of the first things that we’ve done is we’ve taken a joint tactical demonstration using a Blackwing vehicle, which is a three-inch form factor that is sent out of the signal ejector and launches a UAV that will send back video to the submarine that we can use for over the horizon targeting, or third party targeting. We’re integrating that into the system and our office is leading the effort in that area as well.
- MEGANNE ATKINS: Thank you again for the opportunity to be here. My name is Meganne Atkins and I’m the program manager for submarine electronic systems. Within the portfolio we have radar imag ing and our EW systems. I say it’s a very exciting time to be in the ac quisition command because we’re going through three new acquisitions on all three of our programs. We have both inboard and our outboard sensor acquisitions going on right now, which is exciting, and I think is an opportunity for industry really to get involved and help us deliver capability to the fleet as fast as we can.
Our first system is radar transitioning from our mil standard B-16/15 radars over to a COTS-based radar, which we’ll deliver in Block 4 Vir ginia-class, a new construction hull, and 792. It’s a non-hull penetrating COTS radar. Additionally, the way we used to handle our B-16 radars when they weren’t operating exactly how we wanted them to is we put a clip-on COTS radar on the front, and that helped solve some of those problems. So we have integrated that secondary radar as part of the over all radar system, which is something the fleet has shown a lot of positive excitement about, and we’re really looking forward to that as part of our new system. Once we move forward we’re looking at opportunities to back-fit that system onto other classes to resolve some of the older radar systems we have out in the fleet.
For our imaging system, we are in the middle of first article testing on the low-profile photonics mast, that’s our first production low profile mast that we’ll deliver to the fleet sometime next year. We’ll be deliv ering those at about one per month once they start delivering, so that’s another big change for our program.
Further inboard, we’re going to be continuing down the path, along with Captain Jackson and Captain Arnold, part of the SWFTS process, of our inboard imaging system. We just put out the contract for TI-18 and we just put out our sources sought for TI-20 and 22. So again, we’re really looking for industry to get involved and start looking at what we can do and where we can go with the inboard imaging system.
For the EW system, we put out a sources-sought a couple of weeks ago looking for our industry partners to help us look what the way for ward for EW is. EW is a place where it’s ripe for innovation. It was sole sourced for 20 years and now we’re looking for industry to get involved and start to look at new ways for us to move the ball forward in that area. It’s definitely a place for innovation.
Those are our big programs. Ifl don’t have the opportunity to say any more, I would just like to say that when I was back in Virginia new construction I went out there and I realized we never called Electric Boat or Huntington Ingalls, our contractor, our vendor, they were always our shipbuilding partner. That’s how I view our contractors in industry.
They’re our partners and we have to have a good partner. When we have a good relationship, we can do really great things. So anyone who is looking to get involved in the submarine community, anyone who is looking to get involved and look for new innovative places for industry to get involved, 435 is a great place to start to look to move those rela tionships forward.
CAPT SCOTT PAPPANO: First I’ll say for those of you who came to pepper Admiral Dave Goggins about the Columbia-class, my apolo gies. Instead, you get the in-service submarine program manager. But the good news is, that is 80 percent of the acquisition lifecycle, so I can talk about way more things than Admiral Goggins.
You’ve already heard from the submarine leadership about what the Navy and the nation’s top priority is, that’s our strategic submarine de terrent. Admiral Goggins and I are at other ends of that spectrum. He’s building the next generation of SSBNs. My job for all submarines is to maintain and modernize those ships throughout their life cycle to deliver the boats to the fleet and capability to the fleet.
My number one priority, not surprisingly, is the Ohio-class SSBNs and getting those ships to 42 years, a ship that was designed with a 30- year service life. We at NAVSEA did a detailed engineering analysis in the ’90s to take a look whether we could extend the lifecycle on that ship. We did an Electric Boat design and our own independent assessment, and in 1998 decided that we could extend that ship to a 42-year service life.
The challenge of not having designed it for that is, what challenges did we not perceive? We foresaw a lot of challenges, but there’s always something else. We’re trying to take as much of a lead angle as we can on that ship to make sure we can dovetail that into the Columbia-class delivery.
There are challenges. We have, through fleet feedback, continued engineering reviews of that ship class. There are many things used in the four SSGNs, which I call an accelerated life cycle, if you will, to operate in a harsher environment, more operating cycles on the equipment on those ships as part of the normal SSGN mission profile, feeding all that data back into the SSBN pipeline to determine what work we have to do going into the future to make sure we get those ships up to 42 years. There are many other priorities, but that’s our top one, and I’ll just end it there.
VADM DONNELLY: You can see the broad range of capabilities they are responsible for. I don’t have a question, so I’m depending on the audience to come up. Sydney Freedberg looks like he has a question loaded. I’ II let you go first.
MR FREEDBERG: This is what I get the medium bucks for, is ask ing a lot of questions. A question really across the board. Several of you have mentioned off-boarding. There’s a lot of interest and intellectual ferment about making the submarines serve the manned hub of a larger range of unmanned things under the water which may or may not come off the sub or may operate from land bases in parallel.
What kind of experiments, pilot projects, are you all doing in your various ways to not just actually develop the unmanned vehicles, but to actually communicate with them, which is not easy under water? You don’t just sort of pick up your short-wave radio and yell. How are you actually working on the concepts, on the technologies, that will enable that vision to become a real thing?
MR ATKINS: For 435 we are going towards building longer arms for the submarine. What we’re doing mostly is we’re relying on ONR and some of our other partners that are doing those S&T type projects. I know Admiral Hahn has come up with his new way to do FNCs and make sure that they’re partnered from the beginning with the program office, so they have a place to transition.
So in our program office we’re really looking at how to look at those in ONR and in particular to look at those areas and help us to move them forward. I’d say IWS-5 is also a part of our advanced processing build. They are looking at areas like that for advanced development and then they bring them into our production offices.
CAPT JACKSON: Communicating with all these off-board vehi cles, like you said, is quite a challenge. My personal experience is main ly with air vehicles, and so we’re talking RF (radio frequency) spectrum to one of the masts on the submarine, so it’s old technology not new technology. I think it gets much tougher when you start talking about the undersea vehicles. I think John may want to talk about the experiment he did and if there’s any lessons learned that came back.
CAPT NEWTON: It’s a great question. I will say we’re working that problem very hard. Acoustically there are options for that and the force is experimenting with acoustic communications. We’ve done a lot of work with tethered vehicles. I had a chance to work with the LRS program years ago, and we’ve established a lot of credibility with that for years and years.
You can get a lot done with autonomous systems as well, as far as there’s independent navigation systems on a lot of these UUVs and you can make a lot of things happen just by getting back to a general area and bringing it back to the submarine, if you expect where it’s going to be Beyond that, I think we’re just working to develop the technology. As an interfacer, I’m mainly concerned with how we’re safe and how we work with UUVs safely around the submarine and house them on the submarine, and that piece.
I will say that we’ve gotten great support from places like ONR and from the warfare centers. We’ve been working with things like LDUUV programs and other programs coming in and out of the dry deck shelters, and even out of some of the SOF interface lockout trunks. So we’re making good progress.
I think there is a long way to go, because it is very difficult. In many ways, since you don’t have that real-time control for a UUV, it makes the problem much more difficult. And then when you magnify on the adverse environment of the ocean, varying sound propagation paths and different environmentals, it makes it very difficult.
VADM DONNELLY: Vice Admiral Paul Sullivan from Penn State.
VADM PAUL SULLIVAN: This is for Mike Stevens. First, I’d like to publicly thank you for allowing an extra flag officer on Alpha trials on New Hampshire. For those of you who haven’t ridden Alpha trials, you’ve got the four-star at Naval Reactors, you’ve got the two-star PEO, you’ve got the one-star group commander, all breathing down your neck. The last thing you need is another three-star on board, but he took me in and it was a really nice Alpha trial.
My question is, you’re the PM for a class that’s going to two per year, that’s going for the Virginia Payload Module, and you’ve got ship builders in the room here with you, how will you compete for design, engineering and water front resources? Can you talk about the integrat ed plan a little bit?
CAPT STEVENS: Yes sir, thank you. We had a clean sweep. We had two one-stars, a two-star, a three-star and a four-star onboard the submarine, so it was a lot of fun. I didn’t eat much.
It wasn’t that bad. It was a lot of fun. The integrated enterprise plan is an effort that we put together with the shipbuilders to ensure that as we go forward with Columbia, and then two per year Virginia and adding the Virginia Payload Module, that we have a very deliberate way to ap proach it with very distinct lines of effort to ensure that prior to ’21, even a little bit earlier, the construction yards can handle the capacity.
I think they’ll admit freely that ramp-ups are difficult, particularly when it comes to critical skills. They will attest to you first-hand that it’s the critical skills that are so tough. You can hire a lot of people but hav ing people who can do what you need them to do correctly the first time in shipbuilding is not easy. So a part of our integrated plan is to start to address how we can train those people and get them onboard.
More to your question, the design part of it, that’s the first LOE (Line of effort), making sure that we do in fact have enough people on the design end of it that are implementing the ship’s designs, getting done with the disclosures, the arrangements and disclosures. To this point it’s really- I don’t think at this point, particularly on VPM, manpower is not the problem. The real kind of transitional part where you’ve got enough arrangements that push through, so that’s always kind of a knot right there, I think. We’re moving through that well.
And then there’s the transition to the new integrated product devel opment environment, which is transitional as well. That’s a new envi ronment in which to design in three-dimensional CAD for instance, and that’s transitional. That’s challenging, I think, and we’ll push through that. I think there’s a good plan that integrated to get through it.
Did that answer your question? VADM SULLIVAN: Close enough.
CAPT STEVENS: Close enough, good.
VADM DONNELLY: Ken Perry has got a question.
RDML KEN PERRY: I want to first congratulate Captain Stevens and your program office for what is regarded as the most successful tran sition program – (off mic) – theme of the conference, get faster. I’m going to ask, what are the changes that might help government get faster, and what would you like to see from industry to help get faster?
CAPT STEVENS: I think that’s a great question. I was just at a din ner with the CEO of Raytheon. He was talking about where technology is going in the future. He’s got some great insight and his point was the last 10 years you thought things changed a lot. You’re walking around with a super computer in your hand. You think that’s a big deal.
He said, the next 10 years, we’re just hitting the knee on the expo nential curve in terms of how technology is going to change our lives. You have things like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and things that are really going to revolutionize even to the next level. How do we keep up with that?
One of the points is, we have these requirements and we want to keep the requirements steady and we need to keep them locked so that we can build efficiently and cost-effectively. If we keep changing re quirements so fast that we can’t approach it in a deliberate fashion, scope creep occurs, growth occurs, and you don’t build anything because it gets too expensive. So you want to control requirements but yet you need to keep up with the changing technology.
I think we’ve done okay. I think it’s the CNO who has the graph that shows that we’re kind of on this linear slope and our competition is on the exponential slope, and we’ve got to get on that. How do we do that from the government design perspective? It’s definitely challenging be cause it’s a slow, deliberate process on purpose because we are allocating or obligating billions of your dollars, you as taxpayers, so we need to get it right.
I think the Virginia-class is a great example of that. We started de signing that in the ’90s. We’re delivering those ships today and they’re phenomenal. They’re still the best thing by far and away out there.
So we do it right to some extent, how can we do it faster? One of the things clearly is this Tactical Submarine Evolution Program or plan that N97 is leading. I think there’s a lot of very innovative and exciting things that we’re going to try to do mid-block.
When I say mid-block, we contract by a block. I’m taking up all the time here, so I’ll stop, but we contract by the block and we don’t tend to do big things between the blocks. That locks you out for almost five years, but you want to control growth and cost too. We want to get a fixed price and we want to be able to budget accurately and control that aspect of it. So I think how we integrate the TSEP between blocks and how we use it to potentially – we have a vision for ’27 to deliver the [SSN] 806 as the most phenomenal platform ever, and I’m not going to get into any more detail on that. So there’s a big teaser for you, right? But I think that’s a good way to do it faster. I think N97 is doing a really good job at taking the lead and driving that, and hopefully we’ II see some outcome from it. A lot of it is budget driven, so how quickly we change the budget, that’s another behemoth that’s difficult to really change very quickly.
VADM DONNELLY: Let me squeeze in a few quick hitters here for Captain Pappano. You mentioned the challenge of extending Ohio-class to 42 years of service. This may sound like heresy, and there is media in the room, but are you building in any margins just in case Admiral Goggins fails? Can you get to 43?
CAPT PAPPANO: We made some very good decisions on Ohio, okay, on what the limitations might be at 42 years. So there’s two sides of the picture. The enterprise decision to modernize the electronics sys tem with the SWFTS model was brilliant because that takes both an ob solescence and capability improvements that make that go away for the rest of the life of the ship.
So I worry much less about the NPES side of the house than I do the HM&E side of the house. The HM&E side of the house is really where we’re spending our time right now to make sure that we have – that we can take a lead angle on performance based on SSBN performance, based on continuing engineering. But it’s going to be that stop-gap at the end there that stops us, that ends the life of the ship.
Right now, 42 years is what we’ve analyzed to. There are some un known unknowns. We know we’re going to be out there, but we’re con fident we can get to that point. I’m not confident we can go beyond the 42 years right now. So my perspective is it’s imperative that the Colum bia-class deliver when she says she’s going to deliver.
VADM DONNELLY: Thanks. Meganne, when you start to field the low-profile photonics mast, you said one per month. What’s your fielding plan? Will you replace both photonics on each sub at the same time, or one at a time until you get through the whole fleet and then go back for the second one?
MS ATKINS: We have a plan right now to field up at least one low profile mast per ship, starting out in the PAC and starting next year until 2019.
VADM DONNELLY: I don’t know much about that program, but visually will it be much different from the mast we’re using on the 688-class submarine? In other words, will it be a class identifier for that mast launched to a Virginia-class?
MS ATKINS: That’s not the point. We’re not going to do that if at all possible. The original photonics mast, I think we’ve learned our lesson hard on that one.
VADM DONNELLY: For Captain Newton, is your plan for the ex tension of the dry deck shelter, does that contract modify all six DDSs?
CAPT NEWTON: No, we worked with Oceaneering and our design that we have designed is going to be able to be applied to all six dry deck shelters. So early on we envisioned there might be a need for that, so we have a design that’s robust enough to handle that. We’ve looked at all the drawings and we think it will be applicable to all of them.
The six shelters were built over a 10 year period from 1982 to 1991 by different vendors. Just as any ship is built, there’s a lot of unique differences in how they mate up to the individual submarines, what the piping configuration looks like in them. But we’ve accounted for that in the design.
My contract for the construction is for the first prototype technology demonstrator. We’re looking at building that next year. We’re working with my sponsors to figure out the plan for the rest of the force. Very appropriately, they want to see how well the dry deck shelter modernize program does when it hits the water and how pleased the operators are with it and what the actual need is.
I think I made this point, it’s more than just an extension, a dramatic increase in volume. It also allows the capability to bring divers from outside the ship inside the skin of the ship to remotely operate the control on the flood drain and open and index the payload out with our hydrauli cally operated arm. That’s what Oceaneering has designed for me. That will give us the potential for an autonomous payload to actually get the complement of people down onboard the submarine, which is going to be tighter on space in almost any configuration for the Virginia Payload Module boats or the extant Virginia-class SSGN. So I’m very excited about the program.
MR._: Since the word safety has been brought up several times and the name Greeneville has been brought up, where do we stand on the 360 look photonics mast and the photonics mast reliability issues that we had several years ago?
MS ATKINS: The instantaneous 360 look is part of what we would put out for TOTIM, which is the next generation mast for imaging.
That’s a bit out into the future. I can’t talk about the specifics here, but that is probably a few more years out for the instantaneous 360 look, which I think is the demand signal that we’re looking for.
Certainly, the reliability and availability of our system has improved greatly, and we have improved that over the last several years. Safety is certainly one of the things that is a major tenet for us. We had a safety stand-down within PEO Subs and we’ve doubled back on that even with in our own program office.
So imaging and radar, as you can imagine when you ‘re doing surface evolutions, those are your main sensors. We have refocused that in our office and we’re looking at requirements, and within the program office, to make sure we’re meeting all those safety requirements and making sure they’re our top priority.
CAPT JACKSON: One of the things we’ve done with Meganne’s ISIS (Integrated Submarine Imaging System) is, as you tum the peri scope, even a legacy optical periscope, it paints a 360 degree picture on the screen and maintains it there. So not only the officer of the deck, but other folks in the control room see it and you get more than one set of eyes on the target. So I think we’ve made a lot of improvements on the imaging side of the system to really improve the ability to detect contacts when we’re at periscope depth.
VADM DONNELLY: For Captain Jackson, back in my day many years ago, when a fast attack submarine would come back from special operations we would have to destroy a large number of hard discs. Has your enclave classification system alleviated that need?
CAPT JACKSON: Yes sir, it has. Early on, as you said, you’d come back, and you’d have a few hard drives. That grew to 20 or 30 hard drives, and I think at the most extreme we got up into the hundreds of hard drives that all had to be destroyed because they were at the higher classification level.
So we’ve developed a system design where a few key components maintain kind of the keys to the kingdom and they have to be maintained at the highest level. But the rest of the system we can downgrade and reuse the hardware at a lower level all the way to its end of life. Now at the end of life, just in case our methods to keep those sanitized didn’t work, we do destroy them all at the highest level. It’s necessary to de-stroy them at the highest level of data that might have been on those at any time. But throughout the life, we can keep them in place and not have to worry about them.
VADM DONNELLY: My last question for Captain Stevens, now that the Virginia-class program has settled into two per year build rate, do you have any concerns about the supplier base, either for government furnished equipment or contractor furnished equipment keeping up with that? And are you concerned about the potential for three a year subma rine construction when Columbia comes onboard?
CAPT STEVENS: I think we’re all very concerned with the indus trial base from a standpoint of, this is a significant amount of demand that they’re going to see increase their way. If you talk to Blair Decker or Rear Admiral Goggins, they’ll tell you that we’re down to about 3,000 suppliers, many of them sole source. During the Cold War, the peak, it was closer to 20,000.
Certainly, our supplier base has narrowed and it’s more sole sourced than it has ever been. We have, I think, a higher demand from that same supply base. There are particular suppliers that we’re focused on, and what we’re doing as part of the Integrated Enterprise Plan is there’s a specific line of effort that’s focusing on the material, identifying who are the common vendors. I think we’re on the right track.
We’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s a huge problem to tackle, iden tifying the common vendors and where their risks are. Do they have capacity going forward? How old are their tools, their critical skills?
Do they have the ability to hire more people? What’s the job market in their labor region? Understanding all of that as we impact them in the next five years with potentially two to three times the demand, can they keep up with it? If they can’t, what do we need to do to help them get to where we need them to be to deliver quality products at the rate that we need?
Some of the things I’m encouraged by. The builders, both Newport News and Electric Boat, are looking across all three programs, not just submarines-this is about the carriers too. They’re in there. They order a lot of stuff, believe it or not. So through carriers, Columbia and Virginia with VPM, you’re talking a lot of demand on some of these companies. I’ve been out personally to over two dozen of them, and many of them, you’re not looking at these major manufacturing sites that are the ones -you know, you’ II drive by them. If you’re driving down the road, you’ll drive by them and never know they are there. And yet, if that place shuts down you’d stop building submarines. So we’ve got to pro tect them and we’ve got to ensure they can handle the capacity.
I think we’ve done a lot with Newport News and Electric Boat work ing together to ensure that procurement orders in particular go out in a synchronized fashion so that we don’t potentially overload the supply chain It’s beneficial to us for one thing. We get the real benefit of eco nomic order quantity when procurements go out simultaneously. But it’s also beneficial because then the particular company has the necessary information and it can determine that maybe it’s a bigger contract so they can use it to go to the bank as collateral and use it to upgrade their ma chines. Or, they just have a better demand signal that they can plan out into the future years, which is so important for many of these companies.
Their planning horizon isn’t the FYDP. In fact, if you say FYDP to most of these companies, they say, WHATUP? How do you spell that? So Future Years Defense Plan, they don’t know it, they don’t see it. Their planning horizon is a year, or two years, sometimes.
So to get them to understand what our real demand is going to be over time is the big part of the Integrated Enterprise Plan, if Admiral Goggins were here, he would talk the same thing. It’s one of our key concerns. We just briefed Navy leadership yesterday and that was pretty much what the conversation devolved into for a good bit of the two hour discussion. So we’re all very concerned, I think. We’re doing many things. I would say everyone would agree it’s not enough yet.
VADM DONNELLY: Very good. Please give a hand to this group.
