On July 25, the U.S. Navy commissioned its newest and most powerful ship: the thousand-foot-long aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman. As home to nearly 6,000 crew members and 80 planes and helicopters, and powered by two nuclear reactors, the $4.5 billion Truman will be the proverbial "big stick." For the nation's only carrier builder, Newport News Shipbuilding, in Virginia, it represents essential revenue. For its officers, the Truman is one of the most prestigious postings in the fleet.
But the Truman is also something else, something that the Navy did not want it to be: the foreseeable future.
The Truman was supposed to be one of the last Nimitz carriers--built to the design that has served American interests since 1975. The original USS Nimitz has just begun its midlife overhaul. Therein lies the problem: Since aircraft carriers last an estimated 50 years, the Truman, and the two carriers to follow in 2002 and 2008, will sail long into the next century; the ship the Navy is scheduled to build in 2013 will, barring the unexpected, still be afloat in 2063--99 years after the Nimitz was first designed. In fact, since the Nimitz itself evolved from earlier ships, "we are still building carriers to the same basic design [as] the [never-finished] United States that was laid down in 1949," said naval historian and author Norman Polmar. "And a lot of people, yours truly included, think it's time to start with a blank slate."
Such a "blank slate" had been the Navy's plan for the 2013 ship, dubbed "CVX." But after years of preliminary studies on an all-new design--including a spaceship-sleek "stealth carrier" concept--the Navy announced in May it could not afford to develop the ambitious new ship by 2013. While intended as a more efficient ship, which in the long term would cost less to operate than current flattops, the CVX in the short term would cost more to design than the Navy could pay.
"We got fired up about trying to do this all in one big step," said Capt. J. Talbot Manvel Jr., the Navy's program manager for CVX. Every detail of design was supposed to be open to debate--even whether CVX would be powered by a nuclear reactor, as the Nimitzes are, or use conventional power. It was, said Manvel, "a clean-sheet approach."
Polmar and other skeptics question how clean the sheet really was: Initial CVX studies leaned noticeably toward the Navy's long-held preference for big, nuclear carriers. Manvel, a non-nuclear engineer, insists the review was objective. "I thought I could come up with a competitive non-nuclear propulsion plant. I couldn't." So the Navy will probably stick with nuclear power for any new design, rather than try a more radical approach.
Even so, said Manvel, "we found that the technical difficulty is enormous." The design's blueprints would require an estimated 228 gigabytes of memory--a stack of floppy disks 1,695 feet high. As a consequence, the cost of "the design exceeded the cost of [building] the ship." To go from the initial research just to a complete set of plans would have cost $6.6 billion.
Manvel admitted that the unprecedented figure "caught Navy leadership by surprise." Said one congressional staffer: It's "embarrassing [that] the Navy could get this far into an effort, which they described to everybody as aimed at a clean-slate design ... and then suddenly announce, 'We don't have enough money!' " The staffer smacked himself on the forehead in mock surprise.
Savings from base closures and other measures "just haven't come through as fast or in the magnitude that they had anticipated," said Scott C. Truver, executive director of the Center for Security Strategies and Operations. "There might have been some optimistic budgeting back there [that's] come home to roost."
Even before Manvel presented his superiors with the $6.6 billion price tag last fall, the blank-slate CVX had hit rough water. "We had not convinced the Congress," admitted Manvel, "and they taxed us heavily." The final fiscal 1998 budget cut the Navy's $90 million CVX research request by $78 million; the House had wanted to cut $88 million.
"We just recognized the fiscal constraints," said Senate Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee chairman John Warner, a Republican from Newport News Shipbuilding's state, Virginia. "We were seeing that the Navy would never be able to generate, in a very short period of time, the full cost of a full R&D program. ... And now the [Navy] has formally stretched out the program."
The top Democrat on the House National Security Committee, Ike Skelton (of Truman's home state, Missouri), also approved of the Navy's new caution: "Walk before you run. I can't fault them. ... The money isn't there."
What Congress did find money for last year was CVN-77, the as-yet-unnamed ship slated for delivery by 2008. It will be the last carrier before CVX--and will definitely be a Nimitz. "The congressmen [seemed] to be very comfortable with the idea of another Nimitz-class carrier," rather than with a new design, said Michael Petters, vice president for carriers at Newport News Shipbuilding. This year, even before the Navy's May cutback, the Senate and House committees both had earmarked $50 million of CVX research money for possible use on the CVN-77.
Both committees had also approved $124.5 million to allow the company to begin building CVN-77 early--a decision the Navy had sought so as to realize long-term savings, and which the builder needed so as to preserve its highly skilled, highly specialized workforce.
Like Navy shipbuilding generally, carrier construction has fallen well below historical rates. Since carrier construction and overhaul make up the majority of Newport News Shipbuilding's revenue, said Petters, delivering a new carrier in 2013 is "absolutely critical to us." From the shipyard's perspective, commentators note, a Nimitz carrier is a bird in the hand; creating an all-new design is secondary.
So what will Newport News build in 2013? How will this first, scaled-down CVX differ from the Nimitz-class CVN-77 that precedes it? Since newer computers require ever-less power and space, providing a new electronic brain is fairly easy: the Truman itself sports a new navigation system.
The guts of a ship are another matter. The Navy wants to replace many of the carrier's maintenance-intensive mechanical systems with more-efficient and more-reliable electric motors. Much of the technology, Manvel said, smiling at the irony, is in fact borrowed from amusement parks. But the electrical power all those high-tech systems will require is serious business: The ship's generating capacity must increase fourfold.
To do that, the Navy must replace the Nimitz class's '60s-vintage nuclear reactors. Drawing on recent work in submarines, the CVX power plant could produce more power with fewer temperamental parts and fewer expensively trained crew members. The redesigned reactor would be the main difference between the Nimitzes and the first CVX, now that the "stealth ship" and other hull changes have been put off until the second or even the third ship in the series. CVX-1 will have a 2013 heart in a 1975 body.
"That," said Manvel, "is as much change as we think we can prudently take on right now--and [that can] also be supported by a constrained budget."
Ironically, CVX cutbacks today may make the Navy spend more money in the future. The original concept draws on the Pentagon's broader program of acquisition reform, a new philosophy that seeks, not performance at any cost, but cost-effectiveness. "What CVX is all about," said Manvel, "is to try to come up with a more affordable, but just as capable, aircraft carrier." Over a carrier's 50-year life, its original procurement is just a fraction of the total "life-cycle cost." "We are challenging ourselves to see if we can cut it in half," said Manvel, "but in terms of a realistic goal now for CVX, where we can't redesign as much as we want, we're looking to reduce [it] 10 to 15 percent. Maybe 25 percent." Those forgone savings, he confessed, would have more than made up for the $6.6 billion needed up front to design an all-new ship. But "right now, in this era of this constrained budget, it's real hard to make that argument stick."
Lexington Institute analyst Loren Thompson concurred: "Every major program decision the military services are making today is driven, to some extent, by a [need] to push costs off into the future . . . to make the numbers fit today." In fact, said budget analyst Stan Collender, a vice president at consulting firm Fleishman-Hillard Inc., "if there's a large up-front cost, and the benefits are long-term, [deferrals are] happening in every department." As CVX-1 sails through its 50 years of service, today's decisions will touch taxpayers long after most of today's legislators and admirals are dead.
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