Interview: James E Turner Jr

Sea Power, Jul 1998

We essentially built the hull cylinders or modules and outfitted them to the greatest extent practical at our Quonset Point, R.I., facility and then moved them by barge to our Groton, Conn., facility to do final integration and testing.

We carried it another step forward when we designed the Seawolfjointly with Newport News to allow a greater degree of preoutfitting. And then we took it further with the New Attack Submarine. We not only made it in sections of up to 1,500 tons and loaded everything in those sections and finished what we could while we had easy access-in a shop versus a waterfront environment-but also fully tested systems in the shop before they were ever put into the hull. The major example of that is the command-and-control system, which will be built on a raft, carried into a shop, plugged into simulated sensors, and put through its paces before it ever gets put into the submarine.

So those were the three paths we took in our evolution from the position we were in before the Cold War ended, when the Navy was buying five submarines a year. First, we restructured our business to control costs and make us affordable. Second, we began designing the product to make it upgradable as technology or missions changed. And third, we shifted to electronic design and coupled that with modular subassembly, preoutfitting, and pretesting to improve producibility and affordability. What do you think led to the shift in the Navy's role in the ship design process from active design work to that of a team player with industry on integrated product teams? TURNER: I think that it came about because of the new electronic design tools that became available and the fact that industry could adapt to changes faster than the Navy organization. I saw this happen, particularly on the New Attack Submarine program at Electric Boat, when we began putting in the [Dassault Systemes-IBM] CATIA [Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Applications] system, which became the body and soul of the electronic design capability. And in the early days, we started to see that the Navy's traditional approach could not keep up. So they had to change to keep up with us. They gladly did it, and then became proactive participants in the process. So I think it just happened as a result of the design tools available to industry and industry's ability to adapt more quickly.

It's part of a larger shift that's occurring. The design and engineering aspects of defense acquisition are migrating from the public to the private sector, where the government's function is to set objectives, broad performance goals, and affordability targets. Industry's role will be to respond with concepts and designs, and then to find and integrate technologies to meet those performance and affordability goals. Could you discuss how Electric Boat's unique teaming arrangement with long-time competitor Newport News Shipbuilding [NNS] came about for the New Attack Submarine program?

TURNER: In line with the Pentagon's 1993 Bottom-Up Review, the Navy had planned to have one nuclear shipbuilder [Newport News] make aircraft carriers and the other [Electric Boat] build a modest number of submarines-less than the number now planned by a few. However, that plan was not well received in Congress, which added two submarines for a total of four over five years, ostensibly two to be built by Electric Boat and two by Newport News.