Chinese Prototype

Naval News website has an article about a Chinese experimental (prototype) unmanned, or optionally manned, small combatant surface vessel.  Here’s a description of the vessel:
 

The new imagery confirms a substantial vessel in trimaran configuration. The ship is armed with at least four vertical launch cells, equipped with multiple sensor panels likely for an electronically scanned array and additional sensors, and a sizeable aviation pad at the rear supporting a VTOL UAV. An organic UAV capability could support the USV particularly in over the horizon (OTH) -targeting for maritime and land attack-roles.
 
If previously shown models of a slightly different configuration are indicative, the design may contain further weapons in recessed bays, including an autocannon on the bow, and torpedo launchers at the sides. Forward of the four missile cells is a notable square area which may incorporate further missile cells.[1]

The vessel is an evolution or refinement of a previous version built in 2019. 
 
The article indicates that the manufacturer currently retains ownership of the craft and that the Chinese navy has not yet expressed any interest in procuring the design.
 
It is possible that the main purpose of the prototype is to assist in international marketing but, regardless, there is no better way to persuade your own government to buy your product than by building a prototype.
 

Chinese Prototype Combat USV

 

I’m not going to discuss the actual combat capabilities because that’s pointless without a CONOPS to reference against.  Still, there are a few noteworthy aspects to this.
 
Manufacturer’s Dime.  All indications are that the vessel was built by the manufacturer, at their cost.  This was once routine in the aviation industry and should be revived as standard practice.  Of course, there’s a limit to how much prototype cost a manufacturer can absorb.  A $20B prototype aircraft carrier, for example, is simply not feasible.  However, producing aspects of a $20B prototype carrier is perfectly reasonable.  For example, that new gravimetric warp launch catapult that is planned to replace the non-functional EMALS should be built and installed on a second hand cargo ship for at sea testing under realistic operating conditions.  That gravity-nullifying, instantaneous, matter transporter that will replace the finicky Ford weapon elevators should be installed on a used, throwaway cargo ship to prove it works before including it in a production design.  Those kinds of prototype costs are within the financial capacity of a builder who is steadily producing $20B+ carriers and, if they aren’t, that alone should be a giant red flag about cost, reliability, and scheduling. 
 
Testing.  It should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway since the Navy seems oblivious: prototypes are invaluable for both demonstration purposes and as a developmental aid.  Build, test, and feed the results back into the design before you commit to production.  China gets to see what works and what doesn’t without committing to something like a massive 55 LCS program before the first ship was even designed.  If/when the Chinese navy wants to build the vessel, both they and the builder will know what the strengths and weaknesses of the design are and can incorporate modifications into the design, as needed.  The LCS, by comparison, was already deep into the production run before the first lessons learned had a chance to feed back into the design process and the result is half a dozen or so LCSes have already been retired and several more are on the chopping block.
 
Cost Estimates.  A prototype hugely reduces the uncertainty about the cost of a new ship.  It should!  You just built it!  You now know exactly what it costs.  Now you can realistically work on cost reductions.
 
 
Conclusion
 
Again, it seems blindingly obvious but I’ll say it anyway.  There is nothing but good that can come from the routine construction of prototypes.  As noted, the use of prototypes provides the ability to wring out the problems from a design and develop very accurate cost estimates.  The manufacturer benefits from an increased likelihood of obtaining a production contract for an existing vessel.  The mere fact that the vessel already exists is a major selling point.  Manufacturers should be eager to build prototypes.
 
Of course, as noted, there is a limit to the amount of money a manufacturer can spend on a prototype with no guarantee of a production contract.  When a prototype gets too big and too expensive for the manufacturer to absorb the total cost, the government can provide partial payment (not full payment!).  The key is to force the manufacturer to put skin in the game.  This encourages higher quality to increase the likelihood of sales and reduce the cost of quality related reworks.  It also motivates the manufacturer to engage in ruthlessly efficient cost cutting and eliminates the practice of continuous change orders.  When you’re building a ship on your own dime, you suddenly become intensely interested in minimizing costs and getting the most bang for your buck as opposed to the perverse, reverse incentives we now have where the manufacturer gets paid more money for poor quality (via reworks) than they do for good quality (no reworks).
 
We should do this for every new ship class.  Build a single prototype, test it thoroughly, and then, and only then, consider a production contract.  The Navy will never do this so Congress should mandate this approach by law.with criminal penalties associated for failure to comply.
 
 
 
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[1]Naval News website, “Chinese Experimental Aviation Platform And Combat USV Emerge In Detailed New Imagery”, Alex Luck, 7-Nov-2024,
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/11/chinese-experimental-aviation-platform-and-combat-usv-emerge-in-detailed-new-imagery/

New Chinese Corvette

Naval News website reports that a new Chinese corvette has begun sea trials.[1]  The vessel has an extreme (think Visby) stealth design, what appears to be some sort of water jet propulsion, and a Zumwalt-type stealth mounting for the forward gun.  The ship is likely a one-off prototype.
 

 

This is what a modern ship should look like.  I’d reduce the superstructure significantly but what’s there is clearly designed for maximum stealth.  There are almost no protruding objects to cause an increase in the ship’s radar (and visible) stealth signature.  This is easily up there with the Visby as regards stealth.  Compare this design to our newest ships, the Constellation and Burke Flt III.  Both are radar beacons compared to this.  We’re so locked into obsolete designs that, for all practical purposes, we’re giving future naval victories to the Chinese.
 

 

The other noteworthy aspect of this is China’s willingness to construct one-off prototypes to explore new designs.  Compare this to our recent new ship designs such as the LCS where we committed to 55 ships before the first was even designed or the Constellation where we committed to 20 ships before the first was even designed or the Burke where we’re committed to a never ending number of ships because we so terrified of a new design failure (with good reason but infinite stupidity!).
 
China is doing its naval buildup correctly and quickly.  In comparison, we are decommissioning ships at a faster rate than we build new ones and are shrinking the fleet. 
 
China is screaming warnings at us and we’re flat out ignoring them.
 
Nothing good will come of this.
 
 
 
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[1]Naval News website, “Chinese Experimental Corvette Starts Sea Trials”, Alex Luck, 17-May-2024,
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/05/chinese-experimental-corvette-starts-sea-trials/

LCS Concurrency and Prototype Lessons

Two pieces of news about the LCS program have appeared of late which highlight just how fundamentally flawed the program was.

 

The first piece of news was the announcement by the Navy that they are retiring the first four LCS after just a few years of service.(2)  Well, let’s be honest … it was just a few years of non-service since they never had functional modules and never conducted any useful deployments.

 

The second piece of news was the announcement that the USS Detroit is being towed back to port due to various mechanical failures including the problem-plagued combining gear which has sidelined almost every LCS that has put to sea.(1)

 

This program was so badly conceived and executed that the list of lessons are nearly endless.  However, I want to focus on two closely related lessons:  concurrency and prototypes.  The lessons from this failed program regarding concurrency (the practice of simultaneous development and construction) and prototypes are stunning in their magnitude and simplicity and yet the Navy continues to repeatedly and fully embrace those failed practices.  For those readers from Navy command levels, you can stop reading now because you’re just going to continue attempting concurrency so there’s nothing for you to learn, here.  For all the rest of you, let’s continue on and learn something about the impact of concurrency and, specifically, its impact on prototyping.

 

As you recall, the Navy committed to a run of 55 LCS ships before the design was even complete;  possibly before it was even begun!  Construction of the first two – arguably – four LCS was well underway before the ship designs and construction blueprints were finalized.  Every organization that has ever looked at the practice of concurrency has condemned it as extremely poor practice that inevitably results in higher costs and failed products.

 

For those who may not be familiar with concurrency and the problems it causes, I’ll offer the following brief description. 

 

The problem is that as the concurrent development proceeds, changes in product design are inevitably required.  Because construction has already begun and completed products have been produced, the newly identified changes have to be back-fit into the under-construction or already produced products which greatly increases costs ( building and then rebuilding - paying twice for the same product, in essence) and, in the extreme such as the F-35, the result is products that can’t be updated with the required changes or the updates are prohibitively expensive.  As the concurrent development continues and the current production design drifts farther and farther from the original products, the early products are rendered ‘orphans’ – non-standard, unfixable, and unusable.

 

On a related note, the LCS program is hardly alone in attempting, and failing, at concurrency.  The F-35 program, for example, has reportedly produced two or three hundred aircraft that are now concurrency orphans that the military has deemed too expensive or too difficult to upgrade.  These aircraft will be shuffled aside and left to rot – a few, perhaps, used for training purposes.  Another example is the Ford program which attempted to build a carrier while simultaneously developing new technologies such as EMALS, AAG, and weapon elevators, none of which yet work as intended.  Undeterred, even now, by the lack of functioning EMALS, AAG, and elevators the Navy has already committed to more Fords! 

 

Returning to the LCS, let’s take a look at the four LCS the Navy is throwing away.  LCS-1,-2,-3,-4 are being retired after just a few years because the Navy states that they are so non-standard that upgrading them to meet the current LCS norms would be cost-prohibitive.  For all practical purposes, the first four LCS were prototypes even though the Navy never referred to them as such until just now as they attempt to justify throwing away essentially brand new ships.

Four LCS Headed for the Scrap Heap

 

Now, let’s consider what a prototype is and why prototypes are built.

 

A prototype is a first of its kind.  As such, it is expected that it will have flaws and problems.  Indeed, that is the purpose of a prototype:  to find and fix design and construction problems so that subsequent versions can be improved.  The very concept of a prototype implies a cycle of one-off production, fixes and learning of lessons, and then feeding the changes back into the next version.  Prototyping is a cyclical process:  build, learn, feed lessons back into the process.  The Navy, however, defied all conventional wisdom and opted not to wait for the first LCS prototype to be wrung out and debugged.  Instead, the Navy plunged into full production without delay.  The result was that the prototypes failed to serve their purpose.  They didn’t identify problems for correction in the subsequent ships.  Instead, the subsequent ships were built with the same problems as the prototypes.  This is why the USS Detroit, the 7^th LCS and the 4^th Freedom class ship, is being towed back to port with a broken combining gear – the same broken combing gear that plagued the prototypes and every other LCS.  The lessons of the failed combining gear in the prototype LCS-1 were not passed on to the rest of the production run because the run was already well along before any lessons could be learned. 

 

What is the point of building a prototype if you don’t wait for the lessons to be learned?

 

The result of this incredible mismanagement is that the Navy is throwing away 4 prototypes.  This is also why you don’t build two different versions of the same ship:  it doubles your prototypes and doubles your wastage!  It’s one thing to throw away a prototype of, say, a pump but it’s another when the prototype is a complete ship that costs nearly $800M as the first few LCS did.  When the prototype is that expensive, you really, really, really, want to take full advantage of the prototype concept and learn all the lessons you can before building the next ship.  Of course, the Navy did not do that and now winds up throwing away $2.4B or so of useless ships.  The LCS prototypes failed to serve their purpose.

 

What did the rush to get LCS hulls in the water accomplish?  There have been no significant deployments and certainly none with a fully functioning module.  The ships have wound up sitting pier side.  They accomplished nothing.  There was plenty of time.  The prototype process could have played out with no detrimental effects and the Navy would have gotten functioning, debugged ships – well, to the extent that an LCS can be considered functioning given that they still have no modules and have myriad inherent design and structural flaws.

 

The purpose of prototypes is to find and wring out the problems before the subsequent ships are built.  Because of concurrency, the prototypes wound up serving no purpose.

 

 

 

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(1)Defense News website, “Littoral combat ship Detroit is being towed into port after another engineering failure”, David B. Larter, 7-Nov-2020,

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/11/06/littoral-combat-ship-detroit-is-being-towed-into-port-after-another-engineering-failure/

 

(2)Defense News website, “US Navy’s first 4 littoral combat ships to leave the fleet in 9 months”, David B. Larter, 1-Jul-2020,

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/07/01/the-us-navys-first-4-littoral-combat-ships-are-out-of-the-fleet-in-9-months/

The Third Zumwalt

There’s been an interesting discussion going in a recent post about the fate of the third Zumwalt, currently under construction.  The Navy has stated that they are no longer pursuing a replacement munition for the cancelled Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP).  Thus, the Zumwalt’s have no functional main armament.  Their guns, the very reason for their existence, are just paperweights.  The magnitude of the stupidity that led to this situation is staggering but typical of the Navy.  We’ll leave that aspect alone, however, for the time being.  Instead, the situation raises an interesting problem and opportunity. 

The problem is the obvious one:  it makes no sense to complete the third Zumwalt with a non-functional gun.  To do so would create a $4B+, 15,000 t ship that carries only 80 VLS cells and a limited radar system.  That's the equivalent of a super-sized frigate or a partially neutered Burke.  That would add almost nothing to the fleet's combat power.

The opportunity is the chance to complete the third ship as a prototype – the question being what kind of prototype?  Here are a few possibilities:

• Complete the ship as a heavy (by today’s standards) naval gunfire support vessel by installing 8” guns.  The guns can be either the old, already tested, Mk71 or some new design.  Yes, it would probably take a year or so to design a new gun but, who cares – the ship isn’t needed.  This would give the Navy a chance to re-acquaint themselves with heavy guns and begin the process of regenerating actual, effective naval fire support.

• Install a navalized version of the Army’s MLRS/ATACMS in place of the guns.  Again, this would give the Navy a chance to explore another form of naval fire support and one with potentially much more range than the original Advanced Gun System would have had – potentially a major improvement!

• Complete the ship as a UAV “carrier” by repurposing the hangar and flight deck to exclusive UAV operations.  This would give the Navy a chance to explore operational integration of UAVs into task groups.

• Complete the ship as an advanced intelligence and surveillance vessel.  Unlike the Pueblo or Liberty, this ship would be able to defend itself and could be sent into high threat areas such as the South/East China Seas, off the Russian coast, or near NKorea.

• Complete the ship as an advanced electronic warfare (EW) ship.  Load it up with every electronic warfare piece of equipment and see what a dedicated EW ship can do.  This would allow the Navy to explore offensive and defensive EW and see if a single ship can provide effective area EW protection.  The ship has plenty of electrical power for the equipment.

We’ve discussed the need for diversity in the fleet and the need for prototypes to promote that diversity.  Well, this a golden, if unwanted, opportunity to prototype something new and potentially useful.  Knowing the Navy, however, they’ll complete the ship with a non-functional gun and waste the opportunity.

Diversity On The Sea

Diversity equals resilience

In nature, if one type of tree develops a susceptibility to a particular disease or pest and largely dies off, another type of tree will take its place in the ecosystem and the overall strength of the ecosystem is preserved.  The ecosystem’s strength lies in its diversity.  If one species fails, another takes its place and the ecosystem goes on.

The same is true of military, and in this discussion, naval forces.  If one type of ship is found to be a failure, or even simply less successful, another type can take its place and the naval force adapts, lives on, and succeeds.  This occurred in WWII.  Our magnificent battleships, lined up neatly at Pearl Harbor, were suddenly found to be failures.  That was okay, though, because we had other types of ships, submarines and carriers chief among them, to take over their role.  Our naval diversity ensured that our Navy was able to adapt, live on, and succeed.

One can’t help but wonder, what if we hadn’t had such diversity of ship types.  What if our submarines and carriers had been excluded from the fleet in the name of budgetary savings and standardization.  What if every capital ship had been an unending progression of minor variations of, say, the Pennsylvania class battleship?  What if, instead of new ship types, we had succeeded the Pennsylvania class with the Pennsylvania Flt II and then the Pennsylvania Flt III and so on – an endless string of slightly improved Pennsylvanias?

Well, fortunately we didn’t do that.  Fortunately we developed new ship types like the long range fleet submarine and the aircraft carrier.  And, fortunately, we learned that lesson – that diversity of ship types equals strength and resilience in the never-ending evolution of naval power.  Yes, as I look proudly out over the row upon row of nearly identical Burkes, the Flt I’s , Flt II’s, Flt IIa’s, and now Flt III’s, I rest easy knowing that our diversity has prepared us for the next unanticipated upset in naval warfare and that we will have plenty of alternate choices to …  ah … um …       You know, as I look upon the ranks of Burkes, it occurs to me that we may not have as diverse a fleet as I thought.

Setting aside the small and non-combat capable LCS and the Ticonderogas that the Navy is in the process of retiring, it occurs to me that we only have one surface warfare ship – the Burke.  If an enemy were to find an effective counter to a Burke or if the dictates and conditions of future naval combat were to negate the capabilities of the Burkes, we wouldn’t have much in the way of alternate platforms to choose from, would we?

The same concepts can be applied to our one and only weapon system, Aegis.  If an enemy develops an effective counter to Aegis, we have nothing else to turn to.

Are we arrogant enough to believe that we are perfectly predicting what future naval combat will be like?  Every war ever fought has produced major, unanticipated changes to the prevailing notions of warfare.  Do we really believe that we will flout all of history and perfectly predict the next war?  It seems unlikely in the extreme.

So, where’s our diversity?  Where are the one-off prototype ships that explore new technologies and new approaches to naval combat?  The answer is that there aren’t any.  We’ve sacrificed innovation and diversity in the name of a few percent savings through standardization on the next ship to be built.

Well, now that you and I have had a chance to think about it, we realize that our current fixation on unending Burkes is wrong.  We should be building all manner of prototype vessels to try out new concepts and see what works and what doesn’t.  For example, 

• Maybe we should have a few 16” big gun battleships in the fleet.

• Maybe we should build a combination ship that’s half carrier and half cruiser.

• Maybe we should build a prototype laser ship even if the technology isn’t yet perfect.  Hey, the technology wasn’t perfected when we built the first carrier, the Langley, but it paid off in experience and lessons learned, didn’t it?

• Maybe we should build a submersible Aegis destroyer.

• Maybe we should build a rail gun fire support vessel.

• Maybe we should build a close-in MLRS and C-RAM amphibious assault support ship.

• Maybe we should build a new generation LST.

• Maybe we should build a replacement SSGN.

• Maybe we should build a short range ballistic missile arsenal ship.

• Maybe we should build a cheap WWII style attack transport as an alternative to our budget busting big deck amphibs.

I can go on all day listing alternative naval ship types that might prove useful in a future war.  Of course, many might not – that’s the nature of experimentation.  As long as we build these as one-off prototypes rather than leap instantly into buying 55 of each like we did with the LCS, who cares if they don’t prove useful?  We won’t be out much.

Building such prototypes has the added advantages of keeping our industrial naval design expertise fresh and vibrant and it would keep our shipyards active and up to date with new construction technologies.

Diversity equals resilience and, right now, our navy is not very diverse or resilient.  That needs to change because the next war is guaranteed to be unlike what we imagine and the more choices we have to choose from, the more likely that we’ll be able to adapt and win.