Interview: James E Turner Jr

Sea Power, Jul 1998

SEA POWER: The U.S. naval shipbuilding industry has undergone quite an evolution in recent years as it confronted the realities of reduced defense budgets. How did you respond at Electric Boat [EB] to the defense downturn? TURNER: One of the basic ways that we responded was to cut the size of our infrastructure and the overall operating costs of the business relative to what the market was going to be. This had nothing to do with technology, nothing to do with productivity. It was just sizing the business with updated processes and procedures that would allow us to compete in a much reduced market.

This became known as reengineering for lower-rate production, or by other terms, but it involved a very methodical analysis of the business and the incorporation of reduced infrastructure, reduced levels of manning, reduced levels of hierarchy, and the elimination of anything we didn't need to do to focus on our core business.

It was a very tough and rigorous scrub of the way we ran the business when it was in the "grow" mode versus looking at greatly reduced defense budgets. Quite frankly, this reengineering effort was more successful than many of us had even dared hope it to be. We were able to influence the cost of doing business by a significant amount.

This is similar to the outcome Secretary of Defense Bill [William S.] Cohen is seeking when he addresses the need for a reduction of the military's present infrastructure. It was also, of course, beneficial to the cost structure that related to completing our existing backlog, and it provided us with a capability to have an affordable costing rate as we've gone forward.

At the same time the production volumes were going down, the availability of rapidly advancing technologies was increasing. This led us to begin designing the New Attack Submarine [NSSN] in such a fashion that it could be easily upgraded as technology improved-whether in sensors, processors, communications equipment, or weapons-or as missions changed. By enabling us to keep the cost down, the submarine becomes an affordable platform over the long term-very capable but also very affordable. because it allows you to change out only minor pieces of the submarine to make substantial changes in its capabilities throughout its service life.

Are you talking about configuring the submarine's subsystems in adaptable components that facilitate technology insertion over time?

TURNER: That's right. We've designed the New Attack Submarine so it can readily accommodate future technology upgrades, because technology is advancing so rapidly. By the time you put a submarine to sea-years after it is designed-some of its technologies may already be outdated, so you have to keep it up to date. In fact, final delivery of some of the systems on the first New Attack Submarine, particularly software, won't occur until the ship is ready to go on patrol, not when it goes to sea trials. And two or three years downstream, some of its systems-primarily software-will get upgraded again.

This new [technology insertion] approach to submarine design evolved around the same time that we were reengineering our infrastructure. Just as we design ships and submarines with weight margins, today those designs must accommodate technology insertion in a routine and affordable manner. And this technology insertion must apply to the ship's payload as well as to its electronic systems.

Has it been facilitated by the availability of electronic, computer-aided design tools?

TURNER: Those are part of the third piece of the evolution we've undergone, which is improved productivity. The increased capability available to us today, from computer-aided design tools and three-dimensional digital product modeling, is allowing us to design the New Attack Submarine much more efficiently and cheaply. We can design, assemble, and test it in cyberspace before cutting steel or bending pipes.

We have leveraged this electronic design capability through the formation of "Design/Build" integrated product teams, which include representatives from the shipbuilders, the Navy, and suppliers. They use the 3-D virtual design capability to examine and resolve New Attack Submarine design and manufacturing issues and to plan for technology insertion-again, before the first piece of steel is cut. We have coupled the electronic design tools with the modular construction techniques we had introduced earlier at Electric Boat to improve the producibility of submarines dramatically.

How long has Electric Boat been doing modular construction?

TURNER: We pioneered it in the late 1970s on the Trident SSBN program and then backfitted it on the SSN-688 [Los Angelesclass] attack submarine program. It was elementary if we look back on it, but we thought it was radical when we did it. The productivity gains or manhour reductions that we projected substantiated modular subassembly and preoutfitting as an approach that held great promise to reduce cost. The 688 was not designed with that in mind. It was designed under the old concept where we built a hull, put holes in it, and then outfitted it through those holes. But we were able, even then, to gain some significant productivity improvements on the 688s by applying those same techniques.