A new breed

Imagine you are suddenly ordered to design a low-cost, high-powered family of warships for the United States-a revolutionary new fleet that could catch enemy missiles before they sank U.S. ships, could kill terrorists far inland before they fired off a Scud missile filled with deadly germs, and could sneak up on enemy gunboats and submarines in muddy shallows.

Don't, your bosses stress, give us more of those big and expensive Cold War-era destroyers and cruisers. Get modern. Automate the ships so that small crews of about 100 sailors can run them. Forget about boilers or gas turbines; use electric motors for propulsion and arm the ship with tomorrow's laser weapons. And remember: If you bring out the wrong kind of warship, you will have wasted up to $100 billion and put the country at risk.

Complicating your task are the requirements of a $2.9 billion contract already in your pocket to design another Navy ship-the previous-generation destroyer called DD-21, which was intended to have a more conventional array of helicopter pads, Tomahawk missiles, and guns to serve as the artillery for the Marines. This contract asks you to design a ship the Navy and the Bush administration no longer want, the ship that the Navy has thrown overboard for the new low-cost warship you're designing next. Yet you've got to finish designing the old ship, keeping in mind that the Navy is planning to use some of the ideas for the DD-21 for the next generation of ships. You have to do a good enough job on the unwanted ship to put you in the lead to win the really lucrative contract to build the new family of warships. That contract, to be awarded in 2005, could end up totaling $100 billion for some 70 warships in the DD(X) family: destroyers, cruisers, and a downsized seagoing killer called LCS, short for littoral combat ship.

The retired rear admiral trying to balance all these demands and win the big contract for his company is Philip Dur. From an office in the former Ingalls Shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Miss., Dur runs ship operations for Northrop Grumman. Northrop Grumman is the one-time airplane manufacturer that practically overnight became the gorilla of Navy shipbuilding, when it snapped up the Avondale, Ingalls, and Newport News shipyards. In April, Northrop Grumman won the first phase of the DD(X) competition. Under that nearly $3 billion contract, it will design and test systems that could go into the new family of ships, but the company won't do any serious metal bending. Come 2005, it will have to compete with General Dynamics and other contractors to actually build the DD(X).

To get an insight into what is going to be a long and difficult delivery of the DD(X) family of ships, I called on the project's two chief midwives, Dur and Rear Adm. Phillip Balisle, the Navy's requirements director. Balisle is one of the Navy's top visionaries. Northrop Grumman must translate his ideas into winning blueprints if it is to build the Navy's 21st-century fleet of surface warships.

"We're running our traps, and we're listening," Dur replied when asked what he is doing right now to bring the DD(X) into being. "I'm asking provocative questions" of Balisle and other Navy and civilian defense executives "to try and force decisions" that can be transformed into designs on drawing boards at the Ingalls yard.

With DD(X), he continued, "you're really juggling technology, the economics of shipbuilding, and the requirements for new ships. I pay attention on all three counts, because for us to design a ship that doesn't meet the requirements is a nonstarter. To design a ship that is so expensive it can only be bought in very small numbers is a nonstarter. And for us to build a ship that doesn't incorporate the technologies that represent the art of the possible would be foolish."

It's clearer now what the Bush administration and the Navy don't want for the DD(X) than what they do want. The Bushies, with little Navy resistance, canceled the DD-21, which was to be named the Zumwalt after the liberal and controversial former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt. Pentagon insiders offer various theories for the cancellation: The DD-21 was a Clinton initiative; it cost too much; it was too single-purpose; it wasn't transformational enough. Many admirals were cool toward the DD-21 as well. They contended that the planned crew of 95 to 125 sailors, one-third the usual size, would be too small to man the destroyer in a firefight.

Navy leaders say they still want the LCS in the DD(X) mix because of its speed, smallness, and lethality. Dur, however, said he is still trying to figure out just what the Navy wants here. "Is this Art Cebrowski's `Street Fighter'?" asked Dur, referring to retired Vice Adm. Cebrowski, now the Pentagon's military transformation director. Cebrowski wants a small, high-speed ship to fight off swarms of enemy gunboats, destroy mines, and find quiet diesel submarines lurking in coastal waters. Or "is this a mini-DD(X)?" Dur continued. "What is it? Where is it meant to fight and operate? What are the requirements for endurance? Is it self-deployable? When it gets there, how many LCSs make a critical mass? What do you want the ship to do?"

Although the DD-21 and DD(X) will be very different ships, Dur said that some of the features of the DD-21 can be used on the newer ship. He cited the DD-21's advanced gun; electric power that not only was to propel the ship's engines but was to supply energy for new weapons such as high-energy lasers; a low-visibility hull; and a superstructure made out of composite fiber rather than steel or aluminum.

One of the features that helped Northrop Grumman win the design contracts for the DD-21/DD(X) was the way it scattered Tomahawk cruise missile launchers around the perimeter of the destroyer rather than clumping them together in the center of the ship. But picturing such a formation and making it work were two different challenges, as will be the case with so many new ideas for the DD(X). "We've got that in our proposal; now we need to engineer the idea," said Dur.

Regardless of how exactly the new generation of ships comes out, Dur and Balisle see a bright future for Navy surface ships both in the war against terrorism and in the regional conflicts that are likely to characterize fighting in the 21st century. Sure, ships will have to compete for money with other weapons, including the Air Force's long-range bombers that can operate from bases in the United States. But today's ship-based missiles can be precisely guided to targets 1,000 miles away, Dur said, and a forward-deployed Navy ship can always be within range of a target without having to refuel as long-range bombers must do. As soon as a 911 call reaches the ship, it can launch a missile in the general direction of the target and rely on satellites and other sensors to guide it into the pickle barrel. "A missile flies wherever the hell it wants, when it wants," he said.

Balisle unveiled his vision for the next generation of warships in the part of the Pentagon that had to be rebuilt after the attacks of 9/11. The lanky Oklahoman said that the surprise attack added to his sense of mission about the DD(X). And he stressed that the DD(X) will be a very different kind of ship, inside and out.

One challenge in designing the new ship is to use today's high-tech electronic gear, without the final version emitting too many electrons, sound waves, or radio waves that an enemy could easily detect. In short, the ships have to be muffled. Such muffling buys what the admiral calls "battle space" so that enemies have to get so close to detect you that they fall within the ship weaponry's "sure-kill" range. A ship also becomes stealthier if it is designed with curved surfaces, which searching enemy radar beams slide around rather than bounce off of. So the DD(X) family will almost certainly look radically different from today's warships.

Inside, the DD(X) will be radically different, too, with electric power just one of the big changes. "We wanted to take some risks in this ship," Balisle said. "We wanted to push technology. We thought we could do that right now because we have an [Aegis-radar-equipped] force of over 90 ships that are the best in the world. In the near term, if we have to go do something with an enemy force, we can rely on those ships. The nation has that insurance. So while we have that insurance policy, this is the time to take a step forward-push technology even a little more than you would if your back was to the wall."

Balisle and fellow conceptualizers of the DD(X) are seeking a ship that can be kept young through constant modernization of the interior and the equipment on top of the hull. This has been the case with the Spruance-class destroyers that went into service in the 1970s and with the Air Force B-52, which, although designed as a doomsday bomber for dropping nukes on the Soviet Union, starred in recent wars as a conventional bomber.

The idea is to have the DD(X) start out as a destroyer but to build in the adaptability to use the same hull configuration in a heavier cruiser or a smaller LCS. Not every ship in this new family will be equipped to do everything. No more will ships head out to sea alone and ready to take on all comers. The idea is to divide the work among a number of ships electronically linked but equipped and armed for different missions. The various skippers, however, will all see on their consoles the same picture of the battlefield generated by satellites, drones, and sensors.

Balisle described the revolutionary concept this way: "In the 21st century, for the first time, I believe we are fixing to embark on building a group of ships from their keels up that will be built" as a linked fighting network. Such a force, he said, will require the Navy to change the way individual ships are equipped, how one ship interacts with another, and how they are deployed.

Another major objective of DD(X) designers is to reduce the costs of manning this new family of ships and keeping them in fighting condition. Escalating maintenance costs are draining the budgets of all the armed services. The Navy's hope is that increased automation and standardized hulls and systems for a whole family of ships will slash manpower and maintenance costs.

But the DD(X) remains a work in progress. It sails on paper, not yet on the sea. How much money will be available for this new fleet is still in question. And as Dur and the ship's other midwives are learning, bringing the DD(X) to birth, and hopefully berth, will require some difficult labor.