WASHINGTON — The next generation LPD 17 Flight II Class amphibious transport
dock ships are moving forward in Main Propulsion Diesel Engine (MPDE) efficiency by installing the common rail fuel injection system on the ship’s FM Colt-Pielstick PC2.5 Sequentially Turbocharged (STC) engine, the Naval Sea Systems Command said in a Feb. 8 release. This technically advanced system replaces the existing mechanical fuel delivery system and is expected to yield significant lifecycle cost savings due to
reduced fuel usage and maintenance costs.

“We made the right decision to incorporate reduced fuel consumption, reduced emissions, less maintenance and improved reliability into our next generation of amphibious ships,” said Capt. Brian Metcalf, LPD 17 class program manager for Program Executive Office (PEO) Ships. “Innovation should be driven into all levels of design, and this is just one example of NAVSEA’s culture of affordability mission.”

The project began in 2015 with discussions between PEO Ships, NAVSEA’s engineering and ship lifecycle management directorates, and Naval Surface Warfare Center Philadelphia Division (NSWCPD), who is serving as technical lead for the contract. Fairbanks Morse engineers collaborated with MAN Diesel and NSWCPD to develop the prototype, which was tested on a future USS Fort Lauderdale (LPD-28) engine.

Upon completion of testing, the common rail fuel injection components were removed and the mechanical fuel injection components were re-installed and
retested prior to shipment. Prototype testing on the factory engines demonstrated fuel savings across the Navy operating envelope, and an emission-reducing engine operating profile was also developed.

The future USS Richard M. McCool Jr. (LPD 29), currently under construction at Huntington Ingalls Industries Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, will be the first of many amphibious ships delivered to the Navy with common rail fuel injection MPDEs.

WASHINGTON — Naval officials need to seek solutions from industry and academia to meet the technological and acquisition challenges of the future, the civilian head of the Navy and Marine Corps said.
“One of the drums that I beat to everybody up and down the ladder is, if you are acquiring things, if you are looking for solutions to your problem, look outside the wire,” said Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer, speaking Feb. 8 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank. “Because I will almost guarantee you: some organization out there, whether large corporate, middle corporate, or small company has probably gone through the same problem you are or have a solution or something that looks like your solution.
“This goes to ‘should cost’ before you find out what it does cost,” he said. “Frame your argument, frame your data which you can glean from the outside. One thing that we have learned in this exercise is that corporate America and academic America will bend over backwards to help the services of this country.”
Spencer said that the Department of the Navy and the defense industry are partners in solution-providing and that the department needs to be a “responsible client” of the defense industry.
“I have to be clear on what I need and what I can provide,” he said, speaking of the need to set clear and firm requirements in an acquisition program.
With the additional resources for readiness provided by Congress in the fiscal 2017 to 2019, “the foundation for readiness has been set,” Spencer said. “Everyone understands they have the resources. This is all being done now to the mantra of urgency.
“We have money, we have plans, we cannot buy time, and that is the biggest stressing point we have right now,” he said.
Spencer said the department is “reviewing every single platform that we have as far as how we’re going to go forward with modernization, what we’re looking at to acquire, and what I call the Force 2.0, which are those weapons systems and concepts that we’re developing.”
Spencer was appearing at CSIS with his Army and Air Force counterparts, Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary Heather Wilson, respectively.

QUANTICO, Va. — From a small plastic clip that keeps a snowshoe fastened to a multi-ton concrete replacement bridge and a wide range of items in between, Marines are using advanced manufacturing, commonly called 3-D printing, to produce in the field or in garrison rather than waiting days or weeks for the normal supply system to respond.

“We’re going hot and heavy” into advanced manufacturing, using materials from plastic to aluminum and other metals and even concrete, Capt. Matthew Friedell, the team leader on advanced manufacturing in the Rapid Sustainment Office at Marine Corps Systems Command said Feb. 7.

Systems Command has sent more than 100 3-D printers to Marine units,
mostly small, desktop size instruments, but also a number of mid-size
devices in 20-foot shipping containers and three huge machines at the
Marine supply depots, Friedell told reporters in a telephone conference
call from Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. Some of the printers, called
tactical fabricating kits, are in the hands of infantry units, he
said.

They also send training teams to help the field units learn how to use their new equipment and provide a support service that can develop the data required to produce the needed item and email it to the requesting unit, Friedell said.

Other crucial services the SysCom office provides are conducting
tests of the material needed for the item to determine if it can be
safely printed by the field unit, and studies of the original
commercial source of the item to protect the company’s intellectual
property rights, he said.

Industry has been very cooperative, but their data rights need to be protected, he said.

But most of the time, the request is for five to 10 small parts, for
which there is no real profit interest for the producer. And often the
needed item is no longer being produced due to the age of the
equipment being repaired.

Items produced by Marines using 3-D printers cited by Friedell and other Marine officials include the snowshoe clip, a plastic buckle on a backpack, a compressor blade for an M-1 tank and a heavy concrete footbridge built by a Marine engineer unit in a test.
           
The long-term thrust for 3-D printing, Marine officials have said, is to greatly improve the ability of small combat units, well separated from senior commands and supply sources under the distributed forces concept, to sustain themselves by producing critically need parts.
           
Flexibility is another key contribution of the printers, Friedell said, noting that the prototype machine that produced the concrete bridge could also produce a security barrier or a shelter.
      
Electrical power is a crucial consideration, Friedell said, because the larger printers require huge amounts of power. Current tactical generators are able to provide the needed power and the services are developing hybrid power sources that combine high-efficiency generators with powerful batteries that can reduce the fuel demands of running the generators.

WASHINGTON — The Navy needs to change the structure of its future
carrier air wings (CVWs) in the future to meet future threats,
particularly in high-end combat against potential adversaries such as
China and Russia, a team of defense analysts said in a published
report.

“If the U.S. Navy is going to continue to invest in aircraft carriers, it need to re-consider how it’s going to configure its [carrier] air wings,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank, speaking Feb. 7 at the center about the new report, Regaining the High Ground at Sea: Transforming the U.S. Navy’s Carrier Air Wing for Great Power Competition.

The Navy’s current CVW “is not designed for the way we’re going to
operate in the future,” Clark said. “I would even go further to say,
unless the Navy is going to re-configure its air wings, it should
reconsider its continued investment in aircraft carriers.”

Clark briefed the audience on worst-case scenario where an adversary such as China could launch a salvo of 600 1,000-pound-class weapons at a carrier strike group and recommended the type of defenses, including a CVW, that would be needed for a carrier to operate in the ocean in a high-end fight.

The report said that today’s CVWs “lack the reach to operate at sufficient ranges from operational areas; the stealth to fight in contested environments; and the specialized capabilities in IRS&T [infrared search and track], EMW [electromagnetic warfare], and ASW [anti-submarine warfare] needed to defeat adversary platforms and systems.”

Clark sees the need for a CVW to move toward including more unmanned aircraft. He recommended development of three new aircraft types: an unmanned air combat vehicle (UCAV); an unmanned refueling aircraft, initially the MQ-25; and FA-XX, a new fighter with a longer strike range.

The report’s recommendations for re-configuring the carrier air wing by 2040 include:

* Sustaining planned procurement of the F/A-18E/F strike fighter through fiscal 2023.

* Sustaining procurement of the F-35C strike fighter through the first half of its planned production, ending in fiscal 2024.

* Develop an FA-XX fighter, a derivative of an existing fighter, by 2024.

* Develop a low-observable UCAV attack aircraft for production by 2025.

* Continue development of the MQ-25 aerial refueling UAV and
increase overall number of tanker aircraft to 12 per air wing. Also,
develop the UCAV as a tanker for the mid-to-late 2030s.

* Retire the EA-18G electronic attack aircraft as they reach the
end of their service lives during the 2030s and replace them with
UCAVs equipped with the Next-Generation Jammer and also with
expendable UAVs and missiles.

* Field a rotary wing MALE [medium-altitude, long-endurance] UAV
(in concert with the Marine Corps) to augment the carrier-based
helicopter squadrons and assume some of the ASW missions.

Clark’s team for the report included Adam Lemon, Peter Haynes, Kyle Libby and Gillian Evans.

WASHINGTON – The Marine Corps and the amphibious fleet will be critical to prevailing in the emerging great power competition in which U.S. forces will have to “fight to get to the fight” against China’s growing military capabilities, the Marine’s top combat development officer said Feb. 7.

To meet that challenge, “We have to work on some things to make this amphibious force more lethal, more survivable,” Lt. Gen. David H. Berger, the Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration, told a Capitol Hill forum sponsored by the Amphibious Warship Industrial Base Coalition.

That would include installing vertical launch tubes, “or other ways to make the ships more lethal” to give them organic ways to defend themselves, “including air defense,” Berger said, noting the services has had decades of not having to worry about being attacked from the air. Berger said. And they must do that while decreasing ships’ electromagnetic signature because “if they can find us, they can target us.”

In addition to their traditional role of projecting Marine forces ashore, Berger said the amphibs “can be mother ships,” capable of launching and recovering scores of unmanned systems “from sovereign territory. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?”

Those unmanned systems could operate from shore or from ships, to observe and kill things. “We don’t have the now, but they are coming,” he said.

Citing his recent command of Marine Forces Pacific, Berger said China “knows they have one team to match” and have “poured 100 percent of their resources into overcoming us.” As a result, the U.S. military is losing its traditional technological advantage.

While joining the industry representatives and an array of House members in urging continued development of a larger and more capable amphibious fleet, Berger drew on his command’s role in producing land combat equipment that can support the fight for sea control.

Noting that the National Defense Strategy advocates the Marines returning to their historic role of establishing and defending forward operating bases, he said they would “need long-range fires, from the ship, from the shore.” In order to control land, they will need “platforms that can move from one to the other.”

To do that, the amphibious force will need connectors, but not the current connectors of amphibious tractors, landing craft utilities and landing craft air cushions, but a new family of connectors being developed by Maj. Gen. David Coffman, director of Expeditionary Forces, who was in the audience.

Those will designed to go “ship to shore and shore to ship. If you’re going to move a distributed force, it’s going to be back and forth. It can’t be the old connectors,” Berger said.

Another thing they will need to operate in the littorals, he said, is anti-mine capability, an area where “we fell asleep… We have to have a mine clearance capability to move fast. If we are going to be moving around in the littorals, we need to fight mines.” That is another threat Coffman’s office is addressing.

Earlier in the forum, eight House members, most of whom serve on the House Armed Services Committee, supported the Navy-Marine Corps goal of expanding the amphibious force from the current 32 ships to 38, including building the new Amphibious Transport Dock (LPD) Flight II ships that will replace the aged Landing Ship Docks (LSD).

The industry representatives emphasized the need to move the planned procurement of the next “big-deck” amphibious assault ship, LHA-9, up from 2024 to 2021 to avoid a seven-year production gap that will harm the shipbuilding work force and substantially add costs.

The House members, including Rep. Joseph Courtney, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, urged the industry coalition to put pressure on lawmakers to support the defense budget, particularly shipbuilding funds.

Courtney noted that the federal budget will not be released until March 12, more than a month late, which “will intensify the need” for industry pressure. “Things will move really fast.”

ARLINGTON, Va. – Because of their agility and relatively low cost, special operations forces (SOF) will continue to play a key role in meeting the global security threats, even with the new emphasis on preparing for the return of great power competition. But SOF and the conventional joint forces must not lose the irregular warfare skills honed in nearly two decades of conflict, two top Special Operations civilian leaders said Feb. 5.

Russia and China are engaging in activities below the level of armed conflict to challenge America’s global influence, but “that is SOF’s specialty,” Owen West, the assistant defense secretary for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC) said.

Addressing the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual SO/LIC conference, West said he did not think the Special Operations Forces would have to change to meet the new era of competition, but the entire defense departments will “have to establish an understanding of what irregular warfare is.”

“Clearly we have adversaries that are playing by a different set of rules” that the United States would not adopt. “But at some point, we have to understand the rules by which they play,” West said.

West repeatedly cited the flexibility and relative low cost of small SOF units and their global footprint, so wherever an adversary appears, SOF can respond. He said one of his jobs as head of SO/LIC is helping the Special Operations Command determine what its priorities are.

“We have to be cheaper, but we have to be flexible and shift forces to the new priorities,” he said.

Speaking earlier, Andrew Knaggs, the deputy assistant defense secretary for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism, said the “National Defense Strategy” created last year by then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has become the “foundational document” that is shaping Defense Department policies and the way it sees itself, the world and the future.

The mandate from that strategy means “DoD will likely operate with a smaller footprint overseas,” meaning that “agility will be more important for success.” And because adversaries are employing irregular warfare tactics to undermine the foundations of U.S. global status, the department must preserve the lessons learned from two decades of irregular warfare and counter-terrorism operations. And it will need “to reorient that to the era of great power competition.”

Knaggs recalled the U.S. military’s history of shifting from the irregular warfare on the Western frontier to high end conflict in the two world wars, “which left us unprepared for irregular war far into Vietnam.” And then again in Afghanistan and Iraq, “we have favored conventional approaches over IR. When given an opportunity to right-size the force, we too often have gone to the conventional approach, which leaves us unprepared for the broad spectrum of threats we face today.”

The current adversaries “have shown the ability to use IR tools to reshape the environment” in which U.S. forces must operate. “We should do the same,” he said.

West made similar points, noting that under the “National Defense Strategy” irregular warfare had become a part of department policy in an effort to end the “boom and bust” practice of standing up and shutting down irregular warfare capabilities.

The policy now is to establish a standard so that a part of the joint force will be ready for irregular warfare. “SOF has always been a part,” he said.

Responding to questions from an NDIA moderator, West said the charges of allegedly criminal actions against a number of SOF personnel is “not indicative of what the force is.”

But he said the alleged actions can erode the trust within the command and “if this trust is jeopardized in any way, it is felt well beyond our walls and will affect the whole force.”

All allegations of criminal behavior will be fully investigated and anyone found guilty will be punished, he said.

West said he did not think the decade-plus of intense operations was a cause for the alleged misbehavior, but if he knew what the cause was, “we’d have fixed it.”

While citing the value of SOF’s low cost “compared to some of the high-end weapons,” West said SOCOM and his office were disappointed that the Air Force stopped its quest to buy a cheap, turbo-prop light attack aircraft, which would have been geared to low-intensity conflict.

RESTON, Va. — The Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vessel (MDUSV), Sea Hunter, became the first ship to successfully autonomously navigate from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and back without a single crew member onboard, except very short-duration boardings by personnel from an escort vessel to check electrical and propulsion systems, the ship’s builder, Leidos, said in a Jan. 31 release.

Leidos designed and built the 132-foot-long Trimaran, Sea Hunter, an autonomous, unmanned vessel capable of traveling for long periods of time and executing a variety of missions at a fraction of the cost of a manned ship. This recent achievement is part of an extended test phase, which has been ongoing since the end of 2016.

“The Sea Hunter program is leading the world in unmanned, fully autonomous naval ship design and production,” said Gerry Fasano, Leidos Defense Group president. “The recent long-range mission is the first of its kind and demonstrates to the U.S. Navy that autonomy technology is ready to move from the developmental and experimental stages to advanced mission testing.”

Sea Hunter will continue long duration and mission package testing throughout 2019. ONR awarded Leidos a potential $43.5 million contract to develop Sea Hunter II, which is currently under construction in Mississippi. The sister ship will be evolved based upon lessons learned during the first Sea Hunter build, evolving mission requirements and further development of autonomy enhancements.

“Our talented team of engineers, scientists and analytical experts have decades of experience that will allow us to deliver a second highly autonomous vessel designed to keep our servicemen and women safe while monitoring the maritime environment,” said Fasano. “We’re excited to showcase our unique and innovative capabilities for a program of great national significance.”

NORFOLK, Va. — No personnel were injured when a U.S. Navy guided-missile cruiser and dry cargo ship made contact during an underway replenishment off the southeastern coast of the United States, Feb. 5, the U.S. Fleet Forces Command Public Affairs said in a release of the same date.

USS Leyte Gulf (CG 55) and USNS Robert E. Peary (T-AKE 5) were able to safely operate after the incident. Damage will be assessed when the ships pull into port.

The ships had been conducting a replenishment-at-sea when the sterns touched at approximately 4 p.m. EST. U.S. Fleet Forces Command and Military Sealift Command will thoroughly investigate this incident.

The ships were conducting operations in conjunction with the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group.

WASHINGTON — The role of the U.S. Navy as a diplomatic and economic actor in U.S. foreign policy and execution is as strong as ever and likely to remain so for the next several decades, the Navy’s top officer said.

“In general, we’re looking at 25 to 50 years — easy — of a maritime-centric world,” said Adm. John M. Richardson, chief of naval operations, speaking Feb. 6 to an audience at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. “[There will be] lots of responsibilities for maritime forces coming in the next 50 years.

“Those responsibilities are not the only military dimension of national power, but the Navy has a tremendous history of enhancing the diplomatic element of national power,” Richardson said. “There have been major treaties and leader summits conducted on U.S. warships. Gunboat diplomacy—there is something to that still. When we visit foreign ports, it’s almost a given that the U.S. ambassadors to that country will host a reception on the ship because its sovereign U.S territory.”

The CNO noted the Navy’s rich role in U.S. diplomatic history, saying that there is “a role for that going forward.”

Regarding influence on economic power, Richardson said the Navy’s role “in preserving sea lines of communication — 90 percent of the world’s trade goes over the seas.”

Richardson said the maritime rules set developed over decades since World War II “provide that level playing field” that has benefited the nations, “perhaps most especially China, which has grown tremendously.

“We need to advocate for preserving that,” he said.

Richardson has advocated consistency in complying with and enforcing international rules regarding freedom of navigation in current areas of tension — the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits — as necessary to preserve the freedom of maritime commerce in international waters.

WASHINGTON — The Navy’s effort to field an electromagnetic rail gun has taken too long to develop but is yielding other technological advances, the Navy’s top officer said.

“I would say that rail gun is the case study that would say, ‘this is how innovation maybe shouldn’t happen,’” said Adm. John M. Richardson, chief of naval operations (CNO), speaking Feb. 6 to an audience at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

“[The rail gun project] has been around 15 years, maybe 20; ’rapid’ doesn’t come to mind in a time frame like that,” the CNO said, having just addressed the need for rapid prototyping and acquisition agility in order to maintain a technological edge in great power competition.

“Now we’ve learned a lot [from the project], and the engineering of building something like that that can handle that much electromagnetic energy and not just explode is challenging,” he said. “So, we’re going to continue after this — we’re going to install this thing, we’re going to continue to develop it, test it. It’s too great a weapon system so it’s going somewhere, hopefully.”

Richardson said that it was not uncommon in innovative approaches to yield unforeseen benefits.

The projectile conceived for the rail gun “is actually a pretty neat thing in and of itself,” he said. “The high-velocity projectile is also usable in just about every gun we have. It can be out in the fleet very, very quickly independent of the rail gun. So, this effort is breeding all sorts of advances. We just need to get the clock sped up with respect to the rail gun.”