Young: Navy Needs Analytical Balanced Discussion About DDG-1000

Defense Daily, Feb 6, 2009

By Geoff Fein

Pentagon acquisition chief John Young continued to make his case for the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class combat ship, citing the need for further discussion on whether the Navy should truncate the new destroyer or go with building more DDG- 51s.

One concern Young raised yesterday with reporters during a Pentagon briefing was that if the Navy stops building DDG-1000s, it's not clear how the service provides air defense for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).

DDG-1000, much like LCS, will operate near shore.

"[DDG-1000] was intended always in the strategy to provide air defense capability for LCS. If you stop building DDG-1000 and you have DDG-51, that really doesn't have that X-band [radar] and isn't intended to operate close to the shore line, in that cluttered environment," Young said.

"Then we have to ask ourselves what is the strategy that is wanting us to buy 55 LCS, which [does not] have any air self-defense capability, and I don't have a ship in inventory that is designed to help provide air cover for that ship," he added.

General Dynamics [GD] Bath Iron Works in Maine and Northrop Grumman [NOC] Shipbuilding's Gulf Coast operations are both building DDG-1000. General Dynamics is expected to cut steel on the first hull next week.

One issue Young hoped to clear up were media reports about the cost of DDG-1000 versus DDG-51.

The procurement unit cost (which includes development costs, as opposed to the average unit procurement cost) for the lead ship in the DDG-1000 class is about $3.3 billion, Young noted.

"But the lead ship carries the design cost, it carries the cost to produce the production drawings and implement the process in the factory," he said. "The ship itself is estimated to cost about $2.5 billion."

Serial production would enable a learning curve that would result in further cost reductions, Young added.

"If you don't buy quantity you don't get the learning curve and you also have a very high cost of the ship because you have to divide the development cost into a small number," he added. "And that's what I think has been inaccurately reported and leaves the wrong impression."

Young pointed out that shipbuilding is unique in that unlike other programs, the cost for production drawings and processes are contained within the price for the lead ship.

"Most programs, aircraft and other programs, we pay for the production drawings and processes in R&D [research and development]," he said. "If you take that out [of DDG-1000 it] is about $2.5 billion and projected to come down to $2.3, $2.2 billion."

"For the record, restarting the DDG-51 program...it is estimated that the lead ship in FY '10 could cost $2.3 billion and it is estimated if we buy two ships in FY '11, which is at least in one budget draft, those ships would be $1.7 billion each," Young added. "But those are ships number 64, 65, and 66. It's not even fair in some ways to have that comparison between a lead ship and number 64, 65 and 66."

Regardless of the numbers, Young added, the Navy needs to discuss whether it wants to spend $2.1 billion for one DDG-51 per year, or $2.3 billion for one DDG-1000 per year.

"Would I pay $200 million more for stealth, for a X-band radar? DDG-51 can't carry both an S- and X-band. DDG-1000 carries a X- and S-band," he said.

DDG-1000 is also an acoustically quiet ship, a magnetically quiet ship which enables protection against mines and those threats., Young explained. "I don't know the answers to these questions. I just know there is a difference in capability, and a difference in price."

"You need to do a warfighting analysis to make some decisions as to whether you would pay more or pay less," he said. "I will tell you for example that that X-band radar is very important for operating in a near-shore littoral environments. That's why that ship has a X-band, because it was supposed to operate near shore and be able to work in area where land masses cause clutter in your radar, and X-bands are better at dealing with clutter."

Young last week visited Bath Iron Works and got to see first hand how DDG-1000 production was coming along.

"The great thing I saw at Bath, the design of [DDG-]1000 is near complete. For the first time we have designed a ship before we started building it," he said. "They have already built the first prototypical modules for the ship and proven to themselves that they can do better than lead ship performance on this ship."

Aside from the warfighting analysis, there needs to be some producability and manufacturing analysis as well as cost analysis, Young added. "But right now I would tell you everything you can see [at Bath], there has been no basis for any projection that says this ship is going to cost $5 or $6 or $7 billion dollars."

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