DDG(X) - Arleigh Burke Replacement

Would have thought the Navy after their horrendous experience with Zumwalt costs and build times Navy had sworn off anything vaguely related to the Zumwalt for the DDG(X) including its IEP propulsion system, strongly hinted at by Rear Adm. Fred Pyle when talking to reporters in January where he mentioned IPS build estimates for the DDG(X) looking to be a very expensive and time consuming to build and also think the Raytheon TSCE a non-starter and they would stick with Aegis as they continue to invest heavily in the Aegis Modernization Program.

One outside possibility they could build USN variant of the ~17,000t Japanese ASEV destroyer (Aegis system equipped vessel) as they are building the Constellation a variant of the Italian FREMM frigate.
 
Zumwalts were supposed to have AAW capabilities on par, if not better than the Burkes. Their SPY-4 sets would be bigger and vastly more capable than SPY-1Ds. The catch to that though is that TSCE hasn’t been configured for BMD.

The Navy is clearly interested in mashing TSCE and AEGIS together. See the ZUES program. If I had to guess, ZUES will be the initial integration steps, then DDG(X) will add BMD capability to that.

Zumwalts costs mostly come from ballooned unit prices. It’s a lot more expensive to buy 3 incredibly advanced ships than 32 of them. Series production would costs be a lot lower. Their cancellation was mostly a result of changing priorities to confront China. No need for a land attack/ASW destroyer when you’re expecting to be fighting in the Taiwan Strait.

Not sure why the USN would buy foreign for DDG(X). Only reason they did so for the Connies is they wanted something fast. DDG(X) won’t be awarded until FY32, and not commissioned until nearly 2040. Plenty of time to design a new hull from scratch. No need to reuse the Zumwalt’s either.

Ford isn’t a lemon, she just returned from her first combat deployment. She’s a lot less conservative than she looks on the surface, especially compared to the Nimitzs. She introduced new reactors, a modified hull, whole new radar set, new combat system stuff, new arresting gear, new elevators, and new catapults. That’s a lot of room for things to go wrong, especially when you’re playing with new tech. Most of the teething issues have been evened out though.

If Cordy could have his way, we’d still be using coal-fired boilers. Or a DDG-51 Flight IV.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Right, G&C is the only American combat Naval Architecture firm I know of.
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There's Huntington Ingalls - AMSEC and a few others. G&C are definitely the 900-pound gorilla, though.

The change for DDG(X) is that the Navy has hired G&C directly, so that they are G&C's client. For the Zumwalt class, G&C worked for the DD-21 Blue Team, making Bath Iron Works their "client" during the initial design phase. That gave them more incentives to sell the design rather than advocate for the Navy.

The DDG(X) arrangement seems to be a reversion to a more traditional approach to ship design, where the Navy and its design agent (G&C here) develop the preliminary design and then the Navy solicits shipyards to perform detailed design and actually build the ships based on that preliminary design. This has the effect of putting a bunch of naval architecture knowledge back on side for the Navy instead of for the builders.

At very least, having G&C working for the Navy now should at least provide a reference design that the Navy can benchmark against, rather than having to take the builders' proposals at face value like they did on DD-21.
 
Cordy said:
Would have thought the Navy after their horrendous experience with Zumwalt costs and build times Navy had sworn off anything vaguely related to the Zumwalt for the DDG(X) including its IEP propulsion system, strongly hinted at by Rear Adm. Fred Pyle when talking to reporters in January where he mentioned IPS build estimates for the DDG(X) looking to be a very expensive and time consuming to build and also think the Raytheon TSCE a non-starter and they would stick with Aegis as they continue to invest heavily in the Aegis Modernization Program.

One outside possibility they could build USN variant of the ~17,000t Japanese ASEV destroyer (Aegis system equipped vessel) as they are building the Constellation a variant of the Italian FREMM frigate.
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The horrendous experience with Zumwalt costs and build times is due to pretty much everything in the ships being brand new, with all the attendant risks and costs - one of the biggest headaches has been programming. Recycling Zumwalt systems in a new design sidesteps that issue for the subsystems used, since they're now developed and the additional R&D costs minimal.

Now, if the IEP is expensive and time-consuming to build on its own merits, that's another thing, but the problems of the Zumwalt class are not an inherent reason not to use subsystems developed for it in DDG(X).
 
That's not to mention that IEP is almost a baseline requirement. Combat systems are only getting more and more energy-intensive, and apparently, they're looking at up to 18-foot SPY-6s. Polmar claims that CG(X)s combat system was supposed to use up to 31 MW of power, that is the full capacity of an MT30. Being able to utilize the ship's full power generation capabilities is only possible with IEP, and that's not to mention the need for growth potential.
 
So, the mooted ZEUS upgrades may or may not actually happen, but it looks like the idea would be to strip out the combat systems functionality from TSCE and let it do ship control and comms, while some version of AEGIS Weapon System basically takes over the CDS functions and controls the radar (SPY-6) and weapon systems. But that's a really huge degree of retrofit and I'm not holding my breath.

If they do go forward with the major (expensive) parts of ZEUS like swapping radars, they will likely be looking to take the same route as the FFG-62s and switch the SAMs to all active homing (SM-2 Block IIIC, SM-6, and ESSM Block 2), so there's no need for terminal illuminators even with SPY-6.
 
Firefinder said:
I will not call 80 missile and radar par with the Burke, after the cutdown at that, little or no.

Like even going Tomahawk heavy with over 20 missiles, you still got a decent amount of SM2s/SM6s before even adding in the quad packing of ESSMs.

The Zumwalt is a beast of AA design even lamed as it is.
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80 cells, 20 Tomahawks, 20 Navalized ATACMS or other IRBM, 6 VL-ASROCs and 3x4 ESSM for self protection, 31 SM2s and SM6s.

Better than I thought, but still set more towards self-protection over group protection.
 
TomS said:
There's Huntington Ingalls - AMSEC and a few others. G&C are definitely the 900-pound gorilla, though.
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I thought HI was a shipyard owner, not naval architects? ie, factory production, not a design studio to use car terms.
 
Scott Kenny said:
80 cells, 20 Tomahawks, 20 Navalized ATACMS or other IRBM, 6 VL-ASROCs and 3x4 ESSM for self protection, 31 SM2s and SM6s.

Better than I thought, but still set more towards self-protection over group protection.
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Those numbers are probably out of whack, given that there is no such thing as Naval TACMS, and you would definitely want more than 12 ESSM for terminal self-defense in the absence of RAM or CIWS (the 30mm guns are boat and maybe drone killers, not ASCM defenses).
 
Scott Kenny said:
I thought HI was a shipyard owner, not naval architects? ie, factory production, not a design studio to use car terms.
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AMSEC is a naval architecture (and other services) company that belongs to HII. And of course I forgot HII Ingalls Shipbuilding, which designed the National Security Cutter and bid for FFG(X) and designed the LPD-17 and the various versions of LHA/LHD.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I thought HI was a shipyard owner, not naval architects? ie, factory production, not a design studio to use car terms.
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Almost all yards have their own design divisions. The yards are also the ones that submit designs during various programs.
 
TomS said:
Those numbers are probably out of whack, given that there is no such thing as Naval TACMS, and you would definitely want more than 12 ESSM for terminal self-defense in the absence of RAM or CIWS (the 30mm guns are boat and maybe drone killers, not ASCM defenses).
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Not to mention the fun thing bout VLS is that you can tailor the load outs to the missile as well.

So you can drop some Tomahawks for more SM types and the like as needed.

The Zumwalts was the Spruance replacement with Shore Support tacked on.

Not a fire support ship with AA/ASW ability.

Fire Support was just the Most publicize ability cause it was so different from the like last 3 generations of designs.
 
TomS said:
Those numbers are probably out of whack, given that there is no such thing as Naval TACMS, and you would definitely want more than 12 ESSM for terminal self-defense in the absence of RAM or CIWS (the 30mm guns are boat and maybe drone killers, not ASCM defenses).
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It was planned, up to and including test launches from submarine VLS...

These days it'd probably be some other IRBM or HGV booster.

Plus some SM3s to smack the Chinese AShBMs early, if the radars could support that.
 
TomS said:
So, the mooted ZEUS upgrades may or may not actually happen, but it looks like the idea would be to strip out the combat systems functionality from TSCE and let it do ship control and comms, while some version of AEGIS Weapon System basically takes over the CDS functions and controls the radar (SPY-6) and weapon systems. But that's a really huge degree of retrofit and I'm not holding my breath.

If they do go forward with the major (expensive) parts of ZEUS like swapping radars, they will likely be looking to take the same route as the FFG-62s and switch the SAMs to all active homing (SM-2 Block IIIC, SM-6, and ESSM Block 2), so there's no need for terminal illuminators even with SPY-6.
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With increasing virtualization, the potential is there to load the necessary components of AEGIS onto the 1000s without as dramatic a hardware refit as such a move would have required a decade ago. Indeed it arguably would be a great way test drive concepts needed to make their fleetwide Integrated Combat System happen.

But it only makes sense if they swap to SPY-6, they have made it clear they 100% aren't interested in putting resources toward making SPY-3 work with the system.
 
The Navy wants to rip out the SPY-3s in favor of EASRs. No point investing in last generation’s hardware, especially if it’s only present on 3 ships
 
Scott Kenny said:
It was planned, up to and including test launches from submarine VLS...

These days it'd probably be some other IRBM or HGV booster.

Plus some SM3s to smack the Chinese AShBMs early, if the radars could support that.
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DD-21 was not initially planned to do TBMD. That shifted a bit when DD-21 gave way to DD(X), because land-attack was no longer the flavor of the month after Afghanistan kicked off (not much NSFS in a land-locked country). But they never actually defined a requirement as far as I know.

NTACMS was the obvious candidate for Advanced Land Attack Missile, but ALAM basically ran out of funding when they selected LASM as the interim solution. And then LASM got cancelled as well (again, thanks Afghanistan!).

You can get a sense for what a charlie foxtrot the whole situation was from this 2002 article. (Full disclosure: Scott Truver, quoted in the article, was my boss at the time.)

Marines Clamor for Long-Range Artillery at Sea

Marines Clamor for Long-Range Artillery at Sea
www.nationaldefensemagazine.org www.nationaldefensemagazine.org
 
TomS said:
DD-21 was not initially planned to do TBMD. That shifted a bit when DD-21 gave way to DD(X), because land-attack was no longer the flavor of the month after Afghanistan kicked off (not much NSFS in a land-locked country). But they never actually defined a requirement as far as I know.
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Right. Then China made some nifty antiship ballistic missiles, so now basically every ship needs to be able to engage IRBMs so they don't get smoked by a DF21 or whatever the new number is. (I'm unsure whether SPY3 was/would have been capable of that, but I'd expect so)
 
that_person said:
I’m not aware of either DD-21 or DD(X) having TBMD capabilities. Any more reading on that?
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That was kid of sloppy phrasing on my part. What happened is that the focus of Navy interest began to swing towards TBMD. That led to a bunch of shifts in program focus.

1) The Volume Search Radar element of the DD-21 Dual-Band Radar changed from L-band (Raytheon) to S-band (Lockheed Martin), I believe because S-band was seen as a better bet for future growth into the CG-21 missile defense ship.

2) CG-21 moved forward in Navy procurement plans, displacing some planned DD-21 production. Obviously, that collapsed when DD-21 went off the rails but in 2003/4, there was real talk of transitioning from DD-21 to CG-21 after a half-dozen or so ships.

Scott Kenny said:
Right. Then China made some nifty antiship ballistic missiles, so now basically every ship needs to be able to engage IRBMs so they don't get smoked by a DF21 or whatever the new number is. (I'm unsure whether SPY3 was/would have been capable of that, but I'd expect so)
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Not SPY-3 as originally planned -- it was the short-range element of the Dual-Band Radar, with an L-band, then S-band VSR for the long-range piece.

When the VSR was killed off (except on Ford), SPY-3 got repurposed into a more general air search set. But it was never intended to be a single-radar solution and it shows. The plan was to grow the VSR into a more powerful missile defense radar on CG-21 for Navy Theater Wide/SM-3.

PS: Designations are fuzzy here. Some folks had the S-band VSR as SPY-4, others as SPY-2 (a designation LM may have also used for HPD). I'm fairly certain (but not 100% sure) that Raytheon expected its L-band VSR to be just another element of SPY-3 rather than treating it as a distinctly different radar with its own designation.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Right. Then China made some nifty antiship ballistic missiles, so now basically every ship needs to be able to engage IRBMs so they don't get smoked by a DF21 or whatever the new number is. (I'm unsure whether SPY3 was/would have been capable of that, but I'd expect so)
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Remember in the past it was reported the Navy said Zumwalt was limited to firing the special to Zumwalt ESSM Block 1 and SM-2 Block IIIAZ with their special JUWL seekers that only work with the X-band SPY-3 radar and Zumwalt is not capable of firing the SM-6 or SM-3, also have seen reported SM-2 has no capability to take out a TBMs, DF17 & DF21, presumably why Navy cooperating in the Lockheed upcoming live trials of the Navy Patriot with Aegis that would give it capability to take out any leakers that evade SM-6s?
 
TomS said:
PS: Designations are fuzzy here. Some folks had the S-band VSR as SPY-4, others as SPY-2 (a designation LM may have also used for HPD). I'm fairly certain (but not 100% sure) that Raytheon expected its L-band VSR to be just another element of SPY-3 rather than treating it as a distinctly different radar with its own designation.
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AN/SPY-2 was definitely HPD. When the DBR's VSR component was awarded to Lockheed, it was designated AN/SPY-4. I don't know if the DoD planned to give the whole DBR a single SPY number before the change to S-band and the competitive award, but even afterwards it treated DBR as one system with 2 arrays rather than 2 separate systems.
 
Cordy said:
Remember in the past it was reported the Navy said Zumwalt was limited to firing the special to Zumwalt ESSM Block 1 and SM-2 Block IIIAZ with their special JUWL seekers that only work with the X-band SPY-3 radar and Zumwalt is not capable of firing the SM-6 or SM-3, also have seen reported SM-2 has no capability to take out a TBMs, DF17 & DF21, presumably why Navy cooperating in the Lockheed upcoming live trials of the Navy Patriot with Aegis that would give it capability to take out any leakers that evade SM-6s?
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That sounds so stupid I don't even know how to respond.

SM3 I might believe, it's purely an ABM, but SM6 is an active radar homing missile. You can throw one of those downrange and tell it where the target should be when the missile radar goes active. Pretty sure it uses the same datalink as SM2.
 
that_person said:
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Polmar, 2001. There where definitely multiple systems called SPY-2.
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Lockheed was working on an active array upgrade of SPY-1 and they referred to it as SPY-2 as part of their marketing push to secure development money for it. It did receive development funding, but at that time it was referred to as "SPY-1E." The Raytheon HPD was based heavily on their AN/TPY-2, so designating it AN/SPY-2 made an unusual amount of sense. At any rate, neither made it to sea.
 
Scott Kenny said:
That sounds so stupid I don't even know how to respond.

SM3 I might believe, it's purely an ABM, but SM6 is an active radar homing missile. You can throw one of those downrange and tell it where the target should be when the missile radar goes active. Pretty sure it uses the same datalink as SM2.
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The Navy has stated that radar sensitivity scales as a cube of the size of the radar aperture so presuming both the SPY-3 and the SPY-6(V)3 do not have the flat panel array size to give the smaller diffraction-limited beamwidth required at longer ranges for the needed target discrimination capability for the SM-6, Constellation with its SPY-6(V)3 will also not fit SM-6s (MDA with the new Alaskan LRDR for targeting ICBMs they went for massive 60' x 60' arrays to give the necessary discrimination).
 
CV12Hornet said:
From my research, the problem the Zumwalts had wasn't the radar or missiles, but the fact that TSCE wasn't programmed to handle BMD and programming that in was seen as time and cost prohibitive when programming was already one of the worst sources of delays.
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I am told by reliable sources that TSCE stands for the "total shit computing environment"
 
zevets said:
I am told by reliable sources that TSCE stands for the "total shit computing environment"
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But how much of that is Sailors gonna bitch, and how much of that is accurate?

I mean, the Trident PM&FL (Performance Monitoring and Fault Logic) system was sarcastically called Pure Magic and Fucking Luck, but it still worked well enough.
 
TSCE - The May 2019 GAO Weapons Systems Annual Assessment on Zumwalt under Software and Cybersecurity reported the program is still continuing to deliver software builds that achieve some of the promised automation. Since the software is not as capable and does not enable as much automation as originally planned, among other things, the Navy has permanently added 31 sailors to the crew compared to initial estimates, increasing life-cycle costs.
 
Cordy said:
TSCE - The May 2019 GAO Weapons Systems Annual Assessment on Zumwalt under Software and Cybersecurity reported the program is still continuing to deliver software builds that achieve some of the promised automation. Since the software is not as capable and does not enable as much automation as originally planned, among other things, the Navy has permanently added 31 sailors to the crew compared to initial estimates, increasing life-cycle costs.
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Ouch. That's a lot of extra bodies...
 
Scott Kenny said:
But how much of that is Sailors gonna bitch, and how much of that is accurate?

I mean, the Trident PM&FL (Performance Monitoring and Fault Logic) system was sarcastically called Pure Magic and Fucking Luck, but it still worked well enough.
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It comes down to the Zumwalts, as designed, being undermanned by about 50 or so sailors in practice.

Zumwalt's engineering casualty in the Panama Canal shows what happens when you under man a ship with too few sailors to perform proper maintenance. Whether that's based on the belief that the Zumwalt's powerplant was more reliable than the Burke/Spruance, or whether TSCE freed up more bodies to do that kind of work, I don't know, but something similar happened to the LCS and require substantial pierside contractor support just to stay functional. Transformation era stuff was a real bad case of the brainworms overall.

This may be comparable to the Aquitaines, since the Italians have about 50 more sailors on their FREMMs, and Aquitaine has a similar crew size to DDG-1000. I don't know of any sort of powerplant casualties in the Aquitaines but they may simply have more reliable shafts.
 
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The original Zumwalt crew spec numbers per the Navy "All Hands" magazine was for158, 130 crew plus 28 air detachment, the Dec 2019 DoD SAR report quotes 217 incl'd air detachment, assuming no change in air detachment the ships crew increased by 59 (45%) to 189 and that's with zero crew for the main weapon system as the two AGS guns non-operational with the LRLAP cancelled back in Nov 2016.
 
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Seems like bout 200 is a sweet spot for a modern warship.

Which makes sense since it need to be able to run at 90 percent 24/7 while at sea unlike a Cargo ship that can make do with 4 people awake at night.

Throw in that 12 hour shifts is notorious ineffective and inefficient?

Means an 8 ish hour set up.

So how ever many people you think a ship needs for standard ops, Con CIC Engines, you need to times that by 3.

Start throwing in the extea hands to do tge random shit ships need daily like cooks or the handyman like stuff covering down while the Main guy either doing more important or being sick. That will add a few more.


Throw in that a person can only wear so many hands beford running into the old "need to be in 3 places at once" deal?

Much like there is no replacement for displacement, theres sometimes no replacement for bodies.

Thats before you get into the pyshicological deal of this.
 
Cordy said:
The original Zumwalt crew spec quote per the Navy "All Hands" magazine was for158, 130 crew plus 28 air detachment, the Dec 2019 DoD SAR report quotes 217 incl'd air detachment, assuming no change in air detachment the ships crew increased by 59 (45%) to 189 and that's with zero crew for the main weapon system as the two AGS guns non-operational with the LRLAP cancelled back in Nov 2016.
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There is a little historical revisionism at work there. The original DD-21 objective for crew size was 95 and both teams claim to have met it. This is well documented (see below). To the best of my knowledge, this number was basically pulled out of thin air but became a hard target in the design process for quite a while. At first, it was with air det, but that was the first "wiggle" in the number, pulling the det out of the "total crew" figure. The number has steadily increased since then and might be close to workable now.


and

1708952353920.png

Again, some disclosure: Ed Whitman, the coauthor of that paper, was one of my mentors in my early career and we worked together for several years.
 
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So one thing that’s recently been brought to my attention, the CBO price estimates for DDG(X) are utter horseshit, and practically worthless.

They seem to think that because the Zumwalt is so much larger than the Burkes, that’s what drove prices up. And then they applied this logic to the ~13000 ton DDG(X) to get the $3.1-$3.4 billion number.

Let’s just completely ignore the fact that the Zumwalts introduced entirely new technologies that were never reused, had a production run of only three hulls, and then the construction line was promptly shut down. Oh, and let’s not forget about the on-again-off-again funding, and meddling from the Good Idea Critters in Congress.

I’m sure none of these things drove up costs. Obviously the extra tonnage made prices balloon.
 

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Also the fact the Steel is cheap.

The....

EVERYTHING ELSE?

Like the radar, the engines, the fifty thousand and one computers to run everything....

Thats what push the price UP.

You can buy a use hull from China, and it still will cost a few billion dollars after fitting all the needed gear.
 
Firefinder said:
Also the fact the Steel is cheap.
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Also every pound more of steel means more power for the same Speed which in the end means more fuel burned even if it may not be used. So a ship with 10% extra structure which they may never use but was there in case it was needed could cost each years millions of dollar in fuel cost allone.
 

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