Mark Vandroff, a retired Navy captain and engineering duty officer, was installed last summer as CEO of Fincantieri Marinette Marine, shipbuilder of the U.S. Navy’s Freedom-class littoral combat ship and now the Constellation-class frigate. A former ship program manager, he brings extensive customer experience to his company.

Vandroff was interviewed by Senior Editor Richard R. Burgess. Excerpts follow.

With some experience now as a shipyard official, what has surprised or impressed you about being on this side of the shipbuilding equation?

VANDROFF: Surprised would be a strong word, but I’m impressed by the dedication and hard work of the men and women who build ships. And by “building ships” I mean a very wide range of activity.

One of my mentors, teachers and former bosses, Sean Stackley — the former LPD 17 program manager, former ASN RDA [assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition] and now senior executive with L3Harris — used to tell us when he was coaching shipbuilding program managers that if you can build a ship, you can do anything because nothing is harder or more complicated than building a ship, the most complex of all human undertakings. What the government program managers deal with is certainly a complicated process on the government side, but now, with a few months as the head of the yard here in Marinette, it’s an even renewed appreciation for just how complicated and just how many things have to go right to get a ship built, everything from the industrial trades, welding, cable pulling, painting to all of the planning and industrial methods, to the engineering design to the purchasing to the contracting, a myriad of legal compliance for us, and all the finance and economics of a business of that size.

It’s not just running a complicated business, but it’s running a complicated business with a very complicated product and a series of complicated relations both with customers and with sub-suppliers.

What insight has your experience as a Navy ship pro­curement official given you that can help improve the shipbuilding industrial base?

VANDROFF: When you take someone with program management leadership on the government side and put them into industry you certainly bring an intimate knowledge and understanding of what the customer wants.

Early on in my tenure, some of the folks on my leadership team seemed puzzled during a meeting by something that our primary government partner on the frigate program had asked us to do. Everyone was scratching their heads and were like ‘Why would they want us to do that?’ I said, back in my days in the DDG 51 program, if I were the government PM, I would want us to do exactly what Capt. Smith had just said even though it didn’t necessarily make sense to someone who didn’t have the background of the kind of dynamics that play in at NAVSEA [Naval Sea Systems Command] and within the OPNAV [Office of the Chief of Naval Operations] and Pentagon staff. I immediately understood what the government customer was looking for and I could translate that to my industry colleagues.

This will sound odd as the head of the Mariette Marine shipyard: One of the things about our current shipbuilding industrial base is that it’s very highly specialized. My yard is highly specialized, given the fact that I’m constrained by the St. Lawrence seaway into the size of ships that I can build. Huntington Ingalls Newport News Shipyard really wouldn’t ever build something small because given the overhead of maintaining facilities to build aircraft carriers. The economics constrain them to build big and for other yards each have their niche. While niches are very efficient and people can get very good at doing their special thing, I worry that the future will require a great deal more flexibility of yards that can do lots of things because the future is always uncertain. This is one of the reasons Fincantieri Marine Group is creating a system of yards across our Wisconsin sites, to continue supporting our customers’ future requirements and missions.

What kind of supply-chain issues currently are of concern to Marinette Marine?

VANDROFF: Supply chain is a hot topic across the shipbuilding industry. Certainly, COVID had a major impact on a lot of our sub-suppliers, mostly in their ability to hold schedule. We’ve seen that across both commodities and finished products especially electronics and anything that has a microchip as a component, but we’ve also seen it in things like switch gear and transformers. Most shipbuilders today rely on a just-in-time delivery system because you want to avoid the warehousing costs of keeping large amounts of material warehoused. One of my top concerns right now is the supply chain impacts we’re seeing.

What capital improvements are in work to get ready for the frigate program?

VANDROFF: We’re making four extensive capital improvement investments in Marinette Marine in order to be able to build the frigate.

Investment No. 1 is in a shiplift. Currently, we build the LCS on land and then introduce it to the water via the time-honored system of a side-launch. We’re not going to be able to stern-launch or side-launch a frigate. It’s too big and we would have to install certain equipment — vertical launch systems, for example — after we side-launched it because of alignment issues. That’s not a very economically efficient way to build a ship.

I would urge you and your readers to Google ‘shiplift’ and look at YouTube, there’s some great videos from around the world. It’s really cutting-edge shipbuilding technology. There’s a transfer platform held in place by, in our case, a set of 58 winches that run attached, 29 on each side, to the platform. You can translate the ship from the land onto the platform, and the winches take tension as the ship rolls onto the platform in order to keep the platform level. And then when you’re ready to put the ship into the water, the winches lower the platform until you get to the point where the ship is then floating from its own buoyancy.

For someone who’s building a ship on the Great Lakes here in the Menominee River floating out into Lake Michigan, the ability to do that with a shiplift is very attractive. The shiplift construction is ongoing and we expect it to complete by the end of 2022.

Right now, we build the littoral combat ships and multi-mission surface combatants in a two-bay erection facility. We can assemble an entire LCS indoors. Building indoors is very important in the Wisconsin winters. That erection bay is not big enough for a frigate. The frigate-size erection bay, Building 34, is nearing completion for May. It will have two bays, each big enough to hold an entire erected Constellation-class frigate.

A new state-of-the-art panel line will be done in a few weeks. This will take steel, cut it into panels, stiffen it up, and then weld it together into modules and sub-assemblies all in one covered area.

We do also have plans sometime early in the frigate process to add to our blast-and-paint capability. When we go to two frigates a year, we will need more blast-and-paint capability and we have a plan to repurpose an old building.

Do you have any plans to increase the size of your force?

VANDROFF: My No. 1 area of effort is the workforce. I will need to increase the workforce in order to fully man the Navy’s plan for the frigate program. Between now and the end of 2023, we’ll need another 400 workers: about 300 in the trades — welders, painters, shipfitters, electricians — and another 100 engineers and other white-collar workers.

We have a unique concern in the Marinette Menominee area: a missing middle in housing. We pay a nice living wage to our workforce such that they’re thankfully making too much to qualify for low-cost government-subsidized housing and yet there’s high-end housing, especially along the lake and the river and other places where you would see nice homes. What we really could use is more middle-class apartments in the area of Menominee and Marinette. We’ve talked to both states about that and they’re thinking of creative ways of helping the natural market forces respond to that. Right now, we’ve got a lot of folks who commute a fairly long way to get to the yard. What I would really like is the available housing to keep the workforce close to the shipyard so that it’s convenient for the workers to get to the yard. If we provide a convenient place to work, we will be able to attract the workforce we need.

We still have not received formal requirements from the federal government that would cause us to have to mandate that our workforce be vaccinated against COVID-19. We’ve taken steps to provide vaccinations very conveniently and at no expense or time to the employee. We’ve had a reasonably good turnout, but I fear that there is some percentage as yet unknown of my workforce that would just not feel comfortable being told to take a COVID vaccine. We’ll do everything we can to continue to make it convenient for employees to get vaccinated. But if the government lays that mandate upon me, I am very concerned that would have a negative impact on my ability to maintain a sufficiently sized workforce to execute all the work that the yard currently has under contract.

Some shipyards — like Huntington Ingalls for example — have an apprentice training program. Do you have anything similar?

VANDROFF: We do have an equivalent that I’m very excited about that will serve us well in the future and can easily be expanded via the Northeast Wisconsin Technical College [NWTC], a system of technical community colleges in northeast Wisconsin. We have a fabulous relationship with them, and they have gone so far as to hire retired Marinette employees to their faculty. The provide technical training in a variety of shipyard-related skills at their campus, which is within walking distance of the shipyard. They’re teaching welding with our welding procedures, using our welding equipment, so a graduate of NWTC, whether it’s in welding or ship-fitting or electrical work, cable-pulling or journeyman electrician or entry-level electrician, comes out of NWTC work-ready and we can hire them. As we recruit, those students know that they’ve got a guaranteed path to a job with us and a career in shipbuilding. We’ve also reached out to local high schools and their shop programs to encourage the kind of skills set that is useful to us in the shipbuilding industry.

At the white-collar level, the University of Wisconsin Green Bay has reached out to my head of engineering for discussions. They’ve allowed us to shape their engineering curriculum. Someone coming out with a mechanical engineering degree has got an academic background and a skillset that is well-matched to our needs for entry-level engineers.

What is the status of the Constellation-class frigate?

VANDROFF: We’re in the detail design phase. The next big milestone of that phase is the critical design review scheduled for February 2022. I have great teammates on the Constellation team: L3Harris, Gibbs & Cox and Trident Maritime Systems. The Navy has been great. I could not ask for a better partner than the current leadership in PMS-515, and so, that’s a big milestone for us. It’s not the end of detail design but it basically marks the completion of the functional design and shows that we have established the right technical baseline to move forward.

After that, we’ll have a production readiness review in March as we continue to achieve a level of production maturity so that we can confidently start building the ship in April of 2022. That review will show that we have the level of design maturity such that we can start building the ship with the right expectation of ‘measure twice, cut once.’ We don’t want to build a ship to an immature state and then have a significant level of rework because it’s not good enough for either us or the Navy. We’re driving for a very high level of maturity so that we have an efficient start of production in April.

From that point on, we’ll go through all the normal milestones that a ship would have after it starts production — the laid keel, eventual float off, trials — and we’re looking forward to a delivery to the Navy of the first ship in 2026.

Are there challenges to using a foreign-designed hull?

VANDROFF: When you take a design that is not U.S. and translate it to the United States to build, you do run into the U.S. Navy technical standards of performance, which are different than a lot of our partner navies, especially in the area of damage control. That induces modifications to the design. The U.S. Navy’s philosophy and standards are more steel and more frequent water-tight bulkheads for different compartmentation.

We now have the Buy American Act and whenever you take perhaps a piece of equipment that would be sourced from a European supplier and sourced out to a U.S. supplier, there will be design changes with that and that’s, again, something that we’ve accounted for and are executing.

What can the Navy and Congress do to make it easier for you to deliver ships on time and on cost?

VANDROFF: Shipbuilding is really hard. There’s nothing that the Navy or Congress can do to make it less hard. I will say the Navy always helps when they really under­stand their requirements and that they have stability in those requirements.

I am fortunate in Marinette in my relationship with my Navy supervisor of shipbuilding partner — the organization that does oversight — has been entirely reasonable. They have been very responsible partners. They’re clearly representing the Navy’s interest, but they’re not doing it in a way that is at all punitive or looking to impact my progress. They’re just looking to make sure that the Navy is getting the quality product that they want. For that, I’m very grateful.

If you look at big trends broadly — cost and schedule, but especially cost — a good chunk of our overhead goes to paying the employee healthcare costs. That is getting worse, not better. And that overhead cost gets passed right on to the customer in terms of cost on a contract.

The government has shown some flexibility in the ability for us to have a favorable cash flow. Certainly, COVID helped that, but it helps our financing costs from a business standpoint to have a quicker flow of cash to have a higher percentage of the ultimate cost of a vessel in available progress payments which were done in order to keep the defense industrial base healthy during COVID. Some of those should probably be made permanent, and for a company like mine you would see lower financing costs. Because financing costs make their way into overhead rates, that would then allow us to deliver product more effectively and more cost-effectively to the ultimate customer.

The 122-year-old U.S. Coast Guard Shipyard at Curtis Bay in Baltimore is a full-service shipyard and an integral part of the Coast Guard’s Surface Forces Logistics Center.

Known simply as the yard, it has a growing workload as new classes of cutters and boats come into the service. However, its experienced workers are retiring, creating a potential gap in skilled tradespeople. Although yard in­ternship programs have existed for decades, growing the workforce organically has increasingly become a priority over the past several years.

New workers with high-tech skills are needed to replace the generation that is retiring, but the available pool of qualified shipyard workers near the Curtis Bay yard has decreased dramatically in recent years.

There are challenges to attracting employees. While workers at the yard are government employees with significant benefits and career potential, the salaries for entry-level engineers and naval architects are not always competitive with industry, making it a challenge to attract young professionals. 

And although the yard used to be able to hire experienced workers from local shipyards — there were 40,000 ship­yard jobs in Baltimore 20 years ago — today, apart from the Coast Guard yard, there are only a handful.

So, as the Coast Guard is recapitalizing its fleet, the yard is retooling its workforce.

“A lot of our older generation workers, our experienced personnel, are gone,” said John Bragaw, production manager for the Coast Guard yard. “We’re trying to fill in the gap and create that workforce for the future.”

Bragaw said the yard is intensifying its outreach efforts to acquaint the local area with what it does and the availability of quality employment opportunities. The yard has been very proactive in working with schools, arranging class visits and tours, mentorships and par­ticipation in job fairs. Through partnerships with local vocational schools and community colleges, the Coast Guard has created innovative internship programs that permit students attending classes to also work as government employees.

“We want to be part of the community,” he said. “We have good partnerships with the local vocational-technical schools. Our employees have visited schools, mentored students and shared their excitement of working on boats. We donated old engines to the school so students could take them apart and reassemble them. We want to get the talent out of those schools and get the people who want to be the future supervisors and leaders of our shipyard.”

The yard has a diverse workforce of about 679 personnel in 12 trade shops, with 465 production craftsmen, 120 managers, engineers and support personnel and 80 military personnel.

Elijah Dorsey, 20, started as a painter and is now also a sandblaster. He has been promoted from helper to worker and will soon be a leader. That’s why Bragaw said the yard is also providing leadership training to help those workers who rise into supervisory positions.

“In the military, you get leadership training from day one, but we can have workers who do essentially the same job for years, and suddenly they get promoted to supervisor, and they don’t have the knowledge or skills,” said Bragaw. “We have to fill that gap. Right now, we train leaders once they get into that supervisory role. But we are beginning to start that leadership training process before they become a supervisor.”

Dorsey is a product of the City of Baltimore’s summer “pathways” internship with the yard.

“The interns spend nine weeks working in different departments to get an overview of what the shipyard does,” said Lamont McCloud, supervisor of the sand­blasting and paint shop. “And they get paid. If they decide to enroll in college, or community college, they can continue in that pathways program. Or they can start working full time here when they graduate.”

McCloud said the internships help young people mature.

“When you become an intern and then an employee, you earn trust and can take on assignments that require you to travel,” McCloud said. “You have to know what you’re doing, because there’s limited supervision when you are on the road.”

Although several generations apart in age, McCloud and Dorsey share a lot in common. McCloud said about three quarters of the yard’s employees live within about 7 miles of the gate. McCloud comes from the same inner-city Baltimore neighborhood as Dorsey and went to the same high school. Then, as now, opportunities were limited.

“We’re part of the community. We, as men, have taken advantage of the opportunity to learn and benefit from a good job. And people see that we have good jobs and are taking care of ourselves and our families,” he said. “The Coast Guard benefits, too, because it needs a stable, trained, skilled and motivated workforce.”

And, he said they are making a difference. “Every one of these boats and ships that we’ve worked on has gone back out and is saving lives and stopping bad guys.”

Starting Young

Much of the yard’s outreach effort is aimed at young people in elementary, middle and high school, to make them aware of the types of careers available to them and acquaint them with the Coast Guard and how the yard supports the service and its mission. In fact, many of the yard’s workers started when they were in high school.

Adam Cole grew up right down the road from the yard in Pasadena, Maryland, but wasn’t familiar with it until he started attending the Center of Applied Technology North (CAT North) in Anne Arundel County. “I didn’t know much about the Coast Guard Yard. I knew they had boats. But representatives from the yard came to CAT North and interviewed a few of us and told us about what they offered.”

At age 16, he began in an internship program within the structural shop.

“When I began working, the average age in the structural shop was about 60 years old. I began as a WG1, going to classes and then working here after school. I started as a full-time employee when I graduated at age 18. Today I’m 36, and I’m the shop foreman.” 

For Olivia Wells, working at the yard helped her decide to get her four-year degree. Like Cole, she attended CAT North, and like him, she didn’t know much about the yard beforehand.

“They came to my class, explained what they do and the jobs that were available. They helped us with some mock interviews, and then I did an actual interview. I got accepted, started the process in my junior year of high school, and began working here during the summer before my senior year. I went to school during the day and then came to the yard and worked after classes. Now I’m planning to enter the University of Delaware to get a B.S. in construction engineering and management.”

“We’d like her to come back and work here after she gets her degree,” Cole said.

Tate Stott, Trent Craig and Jack Williams are former interns from CAT. Brandon Mack participated in the summer intern program for three summers with the New Era Academy partnership youthworks In Baltimore. They came into the electrical program but are being taught electronics out of necessity.

“It’s hard for us to find qualified electronics candidates, so we take people who come in as electricians and train them, so they’re learning both the electrician and elec­tronics skills and they have greater promotion poten­tial,” said Ron Viands, supervisor of the electrical and electronics shop. “We’re going to be stretched with the OPC [offshore patrol vessel] post-delivery availability, which includes the installation of the GFE [government furnished equipment], including classified systems that the contractor won’t be installing. Some of those may be done here, or we may send teams to do it at their home­ports. Either way it’s going to be a huge workload.

“These young gentlemen are here to pick up knowledge, display skills and move up. They’re already thinking about their future,” Viands said. “They’re very motivated. They’re here for careers.”

Viands said there are a lot of motivators for people coming to work at the yard.

“When we interview new people, we show them the ships and all the work we’re doing on them, and how the men and women that go out on those ships absolutely depend on the work they will be doing here. We tell them, ‘Crews depend on the work you will do on those ships, the mission support provided here at the yard is vital to operation mission capability.’ They’re either interested in working here right away or not.”

Although they are young, they are already being entrusted with traveling to support work at remote sites. One of Viands’ youngest employees, 20-year-old Tate Stott, recently returned from Alaska where he serviced Rescue 21 system transponder upgrades on remote towers that could only be reached by helicopter. Sometimes the team had to camp for several days, with the ever-present danger of grizzly bears.

Mutually Beneficial

Anne Arundel County’s two career technical schools, CAT North in Severn and CAT South in Edgewater, have a close partnership with the yard.

According to Adam Sheinhorn, the principal at CAT South, the Coast Guard yard provides opportunities for a multitude of students in a number of programs CAT offers.

“Many of our business partners have a very narrow industry that they work in,” he said. “But with the Coast Guard yard, we’re able to involve students in a variety of our construction trades.”

Sheinhorn said CAT has program advisory committees — made up of people from industry, higher education and the community — for each of the curriculum programs, to make sure what the schools are offering the students is up to date and consistent with what the industries need.

“We don’t want to deliver an outdated education for kids,” he said.

The program advisory committees serve as a great connection point to connect students with industry representatives. “The Coast Guard yard is always sending representatives to those meetings that align with their needs,” Sheinhorn said.

CAT North Principal Joe Rose said he agrees.

“The Coast Guard bring our graduates back here to talk to our classes about how our school prepared them for their jobs, and what they’re doing — the work, training and travel — and the professional development opportunities the Coast Guard makes available to them. They have a lot of credibility, because those workers are not much older than the students here, and the kids can relate to them.”

Tom Dickinson, who manages internships and work study programs at both schools, said the teachers at CAT North and South do an amazing job preparing students.

“The young people that the Coast Guard are selecting are qualified to do the job and have the right attitude and work habits,” he said. Dickinson said the relationship is mutually beneficial.

“They participate as guest speakers, come to our open house events, and serve on our program advisory committee. When they have openings, they visit the classrooms and work with the students on getting their profile set up and applying for the position. They come in multiple times during the year. They set up field trips. They help teach classes. During COVID, they created a video featuring many of our former students giving our current students a virtual tour of the yard and the opportunities there,” he said. “They give a lot back.”

Last week I was pleased to christen the Navy League of the United States’ new platform for naval thought and advocacy, the Center for Maritime Strategy. As first dean and plank owner, our voyage for sound maritime strategy begins with the commissioning crew and our institutional sea trials into 2022.

From the maritime logistics crisis to adversaries embracing Mahanian lessons forgotten by America, the urgency of a public embrace of sound maritime thought and is at a 30-year high. For that reason, Navy League National President David Reilly notes, “Policy development and advocacy are the main reasons for the Navy League’s existence, and we are stepping up our activity in these areas to meet the requirements of 21^st century maritime power.”

Dave and I are shoulder-to-shoulder in the center’s role reinvigorating the league’s position as Theodore Roosevelt’s own flagship for bringing critical maritime issues to the forefront. I am reminded of author Robert Kaplan’s assertion in his book, “Asia’s Cauldron,” that we are living in “a naval century.” The term naval implies not merely a conventional Navy’s importance, but sea power’s far greater military and commercial measure the Navy enables and protects. For this reason, the Center for Maritime Strategy will serve as an advocate for the full scope of American sea power: the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Military Sealift Command, Merchant Marine, our shipping industry at sea and ashore, our shipbuilders, and the industrial base that produces and maintains our ships across the military and commercial spectrum.

As Mahan notes, sea power is as much a measure of “the number following the sea” as those upon it plying and protecting 90% of our trade. To that end, the center will be focused on policy research and advocacy efforts across a broad spectrum of issues that impact the United States’ position as a maritime nation. Although not all encompassing, the long-term goals of the Center will be to Listen, Learn, Educate and Lead by:

• Cultivating understanding of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine as contributors to American security and prosperity. This effort will be led by the Center for Maritime Strategy’s new cadre of full-time maritime policy experts and part-time adjuncts dedicated to policy research.
• Educating and engaging congressional and executive branch officials on the insights and recommendations derived from that research.
• Providing expert congressional testimony on relevant aspects of American maritime power. Actively participate in national security symposia, forums, and conversations.
• Creating and distributing general purpose summaries of research projects and other products for the education and support of Navy League members nationwide.
• Leveraging existing and emerging media channels to disseminate expertise and policy information in real-time, including expert commentary and advocacy on podcasts, television, radio, and the internet.

Our National Vice President and former CNO, Admiral John Richardson, hailed, “The Navy League’s Center for Maritime Strategy will be the go-to place for maritime strategic thought, policy recommendations and informed advocacy. I’m excited about this initiative to boost the Navy League’s citizen voice and help strengthen the United States as a maritime nation.”

I welcome the Navy League’s citizen voices to assist the center in navigating the way forward.  We look forward to collaboration and partnership with other like-minded think tanks and institutions that support our national security objectives and maritime commerce. Recounting the words of John Paul Jones, I invite you:

Sign on… and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me. 

To those who are not yet members of the Navy League, this invitation extends as well. Members receive an insider’s perspective on the Center for Maritime Strategy and up-to-the-moment information on our next Sea-Air-Space Exposition in April 2022. Last August’s Sea-Air-Space brought over 170 speakers and a record 17,000 participants to National Harbor, Maryland, for three days of seminars and discussions with active-duty members of the sea services, retirees, and members of the industrial base.

Speakers, moderators and participants tackled the tough issues we face in the maritime domain in order to identify problems, share information and find solutions. Next year’s exposition will be even better and the Center for Maritime Strategy will be at the forefront of the discussions. I hope to see you on the stage or in the audience — and together, we can regain our sea legs for this “naval century.”

The Northern Indian Ocean region hosts some of the world’s most critical maritime trade routes. Sea lines of communication (SLOCs) crisscross the region, connecting East and West and linking key energy supplies from the Persian Gulf.

The SLOCs pass through two vital maritime choke points: the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz, which connect the Northern Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf via the Gulf of Oman. Currently, an average of 17,000 ships per year pass through the Bab-el-Mandeb, with 42,000 transiting the Strait of Hormuz. While international focus returns to high-end, great power rivalry, these two choke points — and the SLOCs connecting them — have continued to face emerging and enduring low-end asymmetric maritime security threats, posed by both non-state and state actors.

In and around the Bab-el-Mandeb and Gulf of Aden region, the piracy threat of the early 2000s has been replaced by maritime security risks spilling over from the civil war ashore in Yemen. Naval and merchant ships have been attacked with missiles and improvised explosive devices. In and around the Strait of Hormuz, the state-based threat to commercial shipping has persisted for some time, with malign activity continuing today. For example, on Aug. 4 the Panama-flagged MV Asphalt Princess was boarded, reportedly by armed men, in what was believed to have been an attempted hijacking.

The persistent maritime security risks across the region have prompted the establishment of several navy-led maritime security constructs, designed to secure the maritime choke points and waters across the region from the Gulf to the southern Red Sea. The Combined Maritime Forces, led by the U.S. Navy and based in Bahrain, runs three combined task forces (CTFs) that tackle various regional risks. The U.K. Royal Navy’s Bahrain-based U.K. Maritime Component Command (UKMCC) supports U.K. maritime interests in the region, including providing Royal Navy ships for maritime security presence.

Both the U.S. and U.K. also have long-established constructs set up to provide primary points of contact with the merchant shipping community — the Naval Cooperation and Guidance for Shipping (NCAGS) for the U.S. and the U.K. Maritime Trade Organisation (UKMTO) for the U.K.

Following a spate of attacks on merchant shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz in mid-2019, the U.S. Navy moved to establish a multinational organization to provide a security link between the naval and merchant communities. The International Maritime Security Construct (IMSC) is the strategic-level organization; its at-sea operational task force is CTF Sentinel.

“The phrase ‘international solution to an international problem’ is quite a good one because it does involve a lot of countries,” Chief Lynn Cook, a Royal Navy chief petty officer posted to UKMTO but also sitting on IMSC’s watchfloor, told Seapower.

Primary Purpose

A primary purpose of NCAGS, UKMTO, IMSC and other maritime security organizations is to connect merchant shipping transiting the region with multinational security forces that can provide assistance if needed. This communications link between the military and merchant marine stakeholders has always been vital. However, as threats to commercial shipping security endure and increase — challenging the ability to keep the SLOCs open, ensure freedom of navigation and maintain international law at sea — so the importance of improving such communication and enhancing the strategic relationship between these two stakeholders endures and increases as well.

“The crux of commercial shipping is ‘time is money’ and getting from point A to point B,” Lt. Cmdr. Adena Grundy, a merchant mariner and former subject-matter expert and maritime domain analyst with NCAGS, told Seapower. “Any time there’s a [security] concern that could delay the shipping, it’s … a concern for the companies. It goes back to ensuring freedom of navigation, and that commerce can keep moving back and forth.”

The 2019 attacks — which prompted not only the establishment of IMSC/CTF Sentinel, but also a significant international crisis (even in a region where tensions traditionally run high) — underlined the importance of maintaining regional maritime security for both global maritime trade and wider international stability.

For IMSC/CTF Sentinel, which currently numbers eight member countries, its mission has three main pillars, Lt. j.g. Jennifer Bowman, the U.S. Navy public affairs officer for IMSC/CTF Sentinel, told Seapower. These pillars are reassurance, deterrence and partnership. “Our mission is ever vital in this region — to help reassure and stabilize the global economy,” Bowman said.

“Our main mission on the operational side is being able to deter and expose malign activities, both state and state-sponsored,” said Lt. George Gagnon, a U.S. Navy warfare officer posted to IMSC/CTF Sentinel as a lead watchstander and responsible for military staffs/task force coordination.

“We’ve also got the other side, where we want to reassure the shipping community that we’re here, we’re visible, and we’re going to do what we can both to provide that deterrence and try and expose the malign activities to the world, so we can keep the waterways safer,” Gagnon said. “We do that in a lot of different ways. We are maintaining contact, through the ships that work for us, via maritime safety calls on bridge-to-bridge, and by sharing maritime domain awareness [MDA] information.”

“As we’ve seen, incidents have happened recently,” Bowman said. “It’s about being vigilant, it’s about making sure we are out there watching, taking calls, communicating, picking up the phone, [being] available via email and chat, so [the shipping community] knows we’re here.”

As regards understanding what the com­mercial stakeholders need from their military counterparts, “I think the reassurance piece of the mission is so paramount,” Grundy said.

As a business, the shipping community faces multiple pressures.

“If you’re delayed for the port, that delays the next guy. … It’s like a domino effect. It really is just A to B, in-out.”

While the shipping community wants to retain its autonomy to maximize efficiency in moving between points A and B, it also retains anxiety over whether help will be there if needed, Grundy said.

“It’s like a policeman,” Grundy said. “You don’t necessarily want the officer living in your house or hanging out in the yard, but you want to know they’re going to show up if somebody is breaking into the house. … The shipping community just want that reassurance that they can operate freely.”

Presence and Partnership

There are several strands to how the naval community offers such reassurance.

There is simple presence at sea and communicating that presence to both the shipping community and any would-be malign actor.

“Our mission at IMSC is providing overwatch, providing detection. We want to try to de-escalate and deter,” Gagnon said. “Being able to have that transparent messaging and exposure on our side and having our ships out there so the merchant community sees them and hears them, so they can have that reassurance, means we can say, ‘Hey, we’re here, we’re doing our job, and you can continue to navigate these waters safely and freely to get to wherever your point of destination is.’”

As to building communication, reassurance and wid­er partnerships, organizations like IMSC and UKMTO act broadly as middlemen between the military and shipping communities, said Cook. “[IMSC’s] job is to monitor the traffic and keep an eye on the shipping. [We] advise and guide and reassure so they are more likely to follow what we’re asking them to do.

“We give them reasons, ‘don’t go there because,’ rather than just a direct order to not go somewhere,” Cook said.

UKMTO also acts as an initial contact hub for ships with security concerns. “If an incident does happen, first point of contact for a merchantman is UKMTO,” Cook said. UKMTO’s contact telephone number can be found on every ship’s bridge.

“UKMTO tends to act like a directory inquiries service,” Cook said. “UKMTO will get calls for every type of incident — an attack, a medical emergency or just a general breakdown. It then decides who to direct the call to. For instance, if it’s a U.S. ship it will go to NCAGS, if it’s a U.K. ship it will go to UKMCC.”

From NCAGS’ perspective, “We’re keeping constant communication on a daily level with the ships. We keep that line of communication open; we also extend it to company security officers. … It’s a reassurance piece,” Grundy said. “It’s a mutual relationship because they can benefit from that constant update. They know a watchstander answers that phone.”

Information Sharing

A central element of this effective communication is information sharing between the military and merchant marine stakeholders. This is a two-way, mutually beneficial process, Gagnon said.

“It’s being able to connect the dots on the information sharing … understanding what avenues we can utilize right now.”

He pointed to Sea Vision, a Navy-designed, ship automatic identification system (AIS)-based software product NCAGS uses to monitor shipping. “Sea Vision displays AIS and that’s about as up-to-date as we can get on where merchant shipping is,” he said.

“From an IMSC/CTF Sentinel perspective, we have a 24/7 watchfloor, we’re constantly monitoring systems, but we really are only as good as the communication we get from the ships,” Gagnon said. “Ships being able to do the little things like keeping their AIS up to date and communicating with UKMTO, NCAGS, or whomever if they’re seeing things, and being able to continue to build that trust between the merchant industry and us, is going to be crucial as we move forward.”

The military community also continually looks at new ways of getting messages out to the shipping community. One route, Gagnon said, is “staying up to date on how we can utilize open-source information opportunities to expose malign activity when it happens,” for example, via social media channels like Twitter. “As technology changes, as the avenues of communication change, being able to stay on top of that, which we are, and being aware of how we can get the word out is really important,” Gagnon said.

Broadening the Base

While the IMSC, NCAGS and UKMTO representatives all viewed the military-merchant marine stakeholder partnership as strong and effective, they said there are ways to make it stronger still: broadening the stakeholder base to include port owners and others, and improving communications between stakeholders.

“At the end of the day, we’re all trying to achieve the same endgame,” Cook said. “What we’re trying to do is increase MDA and ensure the shipping lanes stay open and the merchantmen have the freedom of navigation that they’re entitled to.”

The NATO Naval Mine Warfare Centre of Excellence (NMW COE) in Ostend, Belgium, is NATO’s main source of expertise regarding all aspects of NMW, leveraging the collective knowledge and expertise from the entire NMW community in support of the alliance.

Like the 26 other COEs accredited by NATO, the NMW COE focuses four main pillars: education, training, exercise and evaluation; analysis and lessons learned; doctrine development and stan­dardization; and concept development and experimentation.

The center brings mine warfare experts together for an annual symposium. Although its two previous conferences were canceled for COVID-19 and other reasons, the 2021 conference was held virtually in June.

“Our focus was how we can learn from each other — not only from military, but also from civilians, and how we can work together in the future,” said Cmdr. Herman Lammers of the Royal Netherlands Navy, director of the NMW COE.

In addition to holding its own conference, the NMW COE participates in a long list of working groups, training courses, conferences and exercises.

“We’re part of NATO’s naval armament, standardization and defense planning working groups, as well as any conference where Naval Mine Warfare is on the agenda. Those meetings are paramount to ensure efficient networking and exchange of expertise and knowledge,” Lammers said. “If we want to be a hub, we need to be present at all those meetings.”

The NMW COE is collocated with EGUERMIN (Ecole de Guerre des Mines), the Belgian-Netherlands Naval Mine Warfare School at Ostend, and assists with their national and international courses when required. Belgium and the Netherlands are founding “framework nations,” with Poland and Italy joining the COE as sponsoring nations. Germany participates via EGUERMIN, through a memorandum of understanding. Lammers said other nations are welcome, too. 

Lammers said the center serves as a “hub of knowledge.” The Lessons Learned and Analysis (LL&A) branch is actively involved in collecting and analyzing lessons learned and lessons identified that are forwarded through the NATO Lessons Learned portal, the NATO Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM) at Northwood, United Kingdom, or directly to the NMW COE. After analyzing the problem, a remedial action is proposed and sometimes even tested, so necessary improvements can be made. Lammers said the NMW COE shares this knowledge with MARCOM, The NATO Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre in Lisbon, Portugal, and among the other maritime COEs.

“It’s important to identify what works, as well as understand what doesn’t work and learn from our mistakes,” said Belgian Navy Cmdr. Ward De Grieve, the center’s chief of staff. “It’s the only way to improve.”

As a COE, Lammers said his team is constantly monitoring and evaluating the future trends and technologies.

“Staying on top of all the new developments in a continuous task. By enabling the exchange of information and experience throughout the maritime community, we can help identify synergies,” Lammers said. “I refer to maritime instead of naval because mines and unexploded ordnance in the maritime domain are no longer exclusively a military issue.”

The COE actively contributes to and participates in exercises like BALTOPS and Bold Move by providing advice and scenario inputs. They develop and evaluate new operating concepts and adapt existing doctrine, as well as establish experimentation with new technologies.

The center conducted experiments during BALTOPS 50 to test and validate experimental tactics involving the use of unmanned underwater and surface vehicles and implemented them into the existing naval mine countermeasures planning and evaluation software tool MCM EXPERT.

The center helps to achieve interoperability among NATO navies through understanding and promoting standardization proposals and updates.

“We are actively participating and contributing to the various working groups and syndicates within NATO to provide balanced advice and proposals to adapt, improve and update existing doctrine,” Lammers said.

Lammers said the NMW COE’s team of seven subject matter experts and small support staff has extensive NMW knowledge and expertise, and can use its relationships, partnerships and connections to assist in many ways.

“If we don’t have an answer to a question, we can rely on our extensive network to provide the necessary answers,” he said. “The NATO NMW COE is the hub of knowledge within NMW. Our focus is not only on the long term, assisting NATO in transformation, but also on real-time practical support to the units at sea.”

Italian army Gen. Paolo Ruggiero, the deputy supreme allied commander transformation, said, “the alliance has been successful because it has constantly adapted and transformed into what was needed to be relevant.”

He credits part of that success to the 27 accredited NATO COEs, including the NMW COE, and the work they do on the four pillars.

According to Ruggiero, the COEs belong to the participating nations, not NATO per se, but are accredited by NATO. There are a set of prerequisites and a rigorous process for a center to be accredited and periodic assessments are required for a COE to maintain its status.

The COEs provide all of the nations a venue to share what they do best. “Each one of them has unique exper­tise,” Ruggiero said. “They can cover similar areas of interest in terms of domain — for instance, maritime, land, air — but they’re specific in one specific military area and expertise.”

The COEs may not involve every NATO nation, but most represent more than one country, and in some cases, they are joined by partner nations such as Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Austria.

“Our partners benefit from this sharing of information, and we benefit from them,” Ruggiero said.

Contributing to the Alliance

Ruggiero said the COEs have provided a way for NATO’s post-Cold War member nations to visibly contribute to the alliance.

“A new country could contribute to NATO by hosting a center of excellence, while at the same time raising the flag of NATO in their country,” he said, adding that COEs are an extraordinary force multiplier for NATO.

“The COEs provide the alliance with a community of nearly 1,000 military and civilian experts that provide their knowledge and experience,” Ruggiero said.

Capt. Robert A. Baughman, USN, mine warfare division director at the U.S. Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC), presented at the recent conference. He said the NATO NMW COE is analogous to SMWDC as a warfighting development center working on tactics, doctrine development, experimentation and integration of new technologies.

“NATO officers can truly specialize as career mine warfare experts,” Baughman said. “The NATO NMW COE provides a unique opportunity for us to leverage all that institutional knowledge and expertise. They’re also co-located with EGUERMIN, their schoolhouse, and we’re plugged in with both of those organizations.

“We leverage their courses of instruction — specifically the staff officer and principal warfare officer courses, for our warfare tactics instructors training pipeline, and take part in their exercises for staff training. We also participate in the NATO Naval Mine Warfare battle rhythm, conferences and in their working groups,” he said. “Mine warfare is a team sport, so it’s critical for us to understand how our allied and partner mine counter­measures systems work, and to integrate into combined operations to build interoperability.”

U.S. shipyards are busy building the next generation of Navy ships and Coast Guard cutters. As the current workforce is retiring, and taking their skills and knowledge with them, the next generation of naval architects, naval engineers, tradesmen and technicians are needed.

The Navy is building guided missile destroyers, amphibious ships, attack submarines, littoral combat ships, and replenishment oilers and embarking on a new guided missile frigate, large surface combatant and ballistic missile submarine programs, not to mention a number of new, smaller ships. The Coast Guard is introducing the national security cutter and fast response cutter and starting the offshore patrol cutter, polar security cutter and waterway commerce cutter programs.

Formal apprenticeship and internship programs are delivering long-lasting results. Many graduates of these programs stay with their organizations for a full career and rise to leadership positions.

The Apprentice School, located at Huntington Ingalls Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia, was founded in 1919 and has delivered more than 10,000 graduates since its founding.

“We’re considered as the leadership factory of the company,” said Latitia McCane, The school’s director of education. The program is in high demand. “We have 4,000 applications for 200 slots,” McCane said.

The company has a pre-apprentice program that gives high school students an early start with a job at the shipyard and preparatory courses to get them ready for school. The Apprentice School and its leadership are structured within Newport News Shipbuilding, a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries.

The school’s facilities range from traditional classrooms to waterfront production facilities.

“We have more than 70 craft instructors who are apprentice graduates,” McCane said. 

Retired Rear Adm. Brad Williamson, executive director of the Hampton Roads Maritime Industrial Base Eco­system (MIBE), said senior-level workers are retiring faster than new ones can be hired.

“The senior workers have a wealth of practical experience that they are taking with them into retirement,” he said, adding that shipyards and other marine industry employers are all looking for talent. “When it comes to these challenges, we’re not alone in shipbuilding. It’s all of the trades, in every industry.”

Williamson called for cooperation instead of competition to help everyone obtain the workforce they need.

“It’s better to come together and to think as a team instead of individual companies,” he said.

Craig Savage, director of communications and external affairs at Mobile, Alabama-based Austal USA, said the workforce development programs benefit everyone.

“Apprenticeship programs not only benefit our industry, but they also provide opportunities for our local communities to learn a valuable trade and apply that skill to either our industry of defense and maritime manufacturing, or other industries in our region,” he said. “These programs are a win-win all the way around.”

Austal currently builds the all-aluminum Independence-class variant of the littoral combat ship and expeditionary fast transport for the Navy. As those programs wind down, the company is transitioning to a capability to build steel ships for the Navy.

AIDT Maritime Training Center, a subsidiary of Alabama Industrial Development Training (AIDT), provides company-specific job training in welding, pipe­fitting, design, structural fitter, safety and leadership to support Alabama’s shipbuilding industry. The center is co-located with the Austal USA shipyard and trains workers to Austal’s methods, tools and standards, and will be vital to training the existing and new workers on steel ship fabrication.

Starting Young

Fincantieri Marinette Marine (FMM) in Wisconsin is building the Freedom-class variant of LCS and multi-mission surface combatant for Saudi Arabia. It has also been selected to build the Navy’s new Constellation-class guided missile frigate, which requires reconfiguring the yard and upgrading facilities to build the larger ships — and hiring more workers.

“We’re working very closely with community partners to help us to find the majority of those positions locally,” said Bethany Skorik, senior manager of public affairs and government relations with FMM. “We’re working with our local school systems, from elementary to middle to high school, on how we can get students interested in shipbuilding. They can start thinking about the really satisfying careers in manufacturing and being able to make something complex like a ship from start to finish.”

Skorik said the shipyard is the largest employer in the region, but occasionally has to remind people the yard is growing and hiring.

“We’re working closely with the area technical colleges. The students come to learn about what we’re doing, tour the shipyard and talk to our employees. We help the schools build curriculum, so that students have a direct path to a job. They can get a two-year degree and an actual job, and we have programs where students can start working towards a tech degree while they’re in high school. And we can hire them right out of high school.”

Skorik said FMM partners with the Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, which built an impressive facility a block away from the shipyard.

“They have welding booths and a ship mock-up to teach electrical work, for example. They not only train people who can come work for us, but we send our employees there to get specific marine electrical training, conduct research or expand their knowledge,” she said.

While some shipyards have grown, a number have also downsized or failed, leaving skilled workers without jobs. In those communities where naval ship construction and repair work has dwindled, public-private partnerships have strived to keep good paying maritime jobs in their regions. When the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and commercial shipyards building ships for the Navy closed, a consortium of educators, the Collegiate Consortium for Workforce and Economic Development (CCWED), came together to help displaced civilian workers retrain, retool and find other jobs. 

Karen Kozachyn, vice president of workforce and economic development at Delaware County Community College in Media, Pennsylvania, and a member of the Business Development Team for CCWED, said the local community colleges have worked together to provide skilled employees.

“If a company asks for training in advanced welding, the consortium team evaluates the need, develops a training plan, locates a training site and then assigns the training to whoever has the capacity,” Kozachyn said. “The curriculum and competencies of the training are established by the employer, so it aligns to the company’s need — it’s never hit or miss.”

Those opportunities exist along a broad spectrum. The Maritime Administration recognizes this and is supporting 27 community colleges, training academies and organizations as Centers of Excellence. 

“We are no longer focused only on mariners who go to sea on big ships, but coastal and inland mariners, as well as the shore jobs and trades related to the maritime industry,” said Shashi Kumar, MARAD national coordinator for maritime education and training.

“These smaller institutions, many of which are near ports or waterways, understand the local need.  They’re more agile, and can create new programs and accomplish things faster,” he said.

Submarine construction is growing at the General Dynamics Electric Boat submarine construction yards at Quonset, Rhode Island, and Groton, Connecticut, as are new state-of-the art facilities to fabricate and assemble them. Electric Boat expects to hire 2,400 engineers, tradesmen and support personnel this year alone, but finding enough trained and qualified workers continues to be elusive.

The Southeastern New England Defense Industry Alliance (SENEDIA) is a next-generation industry partnership supported by workforce development stakeholders. SENEDIA membership include 130 companies, mostly in southeastern new England, but beyond as well supporting submarine construction and undersea technology. It has an $18.6 million DoD contract to develop the Next Generation Submarine Shipbuilding Supply Chain Partnership in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The partnership is comprised of state workforce agencies, academic institutions, training providers, and Manufacturing Extension Partnerships and Procurement Technical Assistance Centers in the region.

According to SENEDIA Executive Director Molly Magee, the partner organizations are teaching basic trade skills to make new shipyard workers immediately productive.

“One of our key goals at SENEDIA is to help engage the next generation workforce so that they see and consider the many high-wage, high-demand, high-growth opportunities, whether STEM or trade/industrial skill related, there are through defense-related career path­ways,” Magee said.

Complex Skillsets

Building complex warships can take place far from the waterfront, for equipment such as sensors, propulsion plants and integrated combat systems. 

James Birge, president of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA), located in North Adams, sees a mutually beneficial relationship between his school and the largest engineering and manufacturing employer in the region, General Dynamics Mission Systems in Pittsfield.

“The company’s business of developing and building complex combat management systems is growing, and there is a need for electrical engineering skill sets — that’s just one discipline — that we could be responsive to. And we want to offer good jobs to our graduates.”

Birge said MCLA is looking at its course offerings as “future-based,” in that “some of the jobs our students will have don’t exist today.”

Ellen Kennedy, president of Berkshire Community College, said her school works with employers and industry sectors in her service area in western Massachusetts to develop a stable and prepared workforce.

“We and MCLA meet with General Dynamics on a regular basis to make sure that our programming aligns with their needs,” she said.

Students from both MCLA and Berkshire, along with other schools, can have internships at General Dynamics.

“Interns are an incredible pipeline to our future workforce,” said Brenda Burdick, director of marketing and public relations for General Dynamics Mission Systems. “We typically see a 65-75% conversion rate from interns to full-time employee.”

General Dynamics Mission Systems invests in its employees and their education and professional development. Employees can be assigned mentors and allow them to participate in rotational assignments that allow them to explore their areas of interest and learn about each facet of the company. It also funds graduate education to develop leaders, business managers and executives, and technical experts.

Government Yards

Like industry, the four government-owned yards have had a large workload coming into shipyard and have been hiring a lot of people. According to John Snell, director for Training and Workforce Development Program Manager for the naval shipyards at Naval Sea Systems Command, there has been a seismic shift in demographics at the yards.

“We used to train our young mechanics said under a few experienced master mechanics, but those senior people have or are now retiring. As these young people have been coming aboard, we’ve needed to get them up to speed quickly.”

Snell said in the not too distant past the Navy was delivering the training in brick-and-mortar schoolhouses, with PowerPoint presentations and a little bit on hands-on training with displays in the back of the classrooms.

“We realized that this was not the path we needed to take to get us into the future,” he said.

That’s why the Navy is updating its training systems to provide more relevant learning that is appropriate for today’s workforce.

“We believe a mechanic needs to touch things — turn a valve, turn a wrench, strike an arc. It’s not the kind of training people can do remotely from home. Most of the online, on-demand training is leadership and supervisory training,” Snell said. “But we are always looking for new simulation capabilities and online tools that can improve and accelerate learning.”

While someone can get a good direct-hire job at one of the naval shipyards, he said the yards’ apprentice programs are a pathway to rewarding, life-long careers.

“The apprenticeship program teaches a lot of things about shipbuilding and repair besides the more-narrow technical skills for a particular trade, and it provides the associate’s degree from one of our community college partners,” he said.

The Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility (PHNSY & IMF) Apprenticeship Training Program is certified by the U.S. Department of Labor and administered through a contract between Honolulu Community College and PHNSY & IMF. The program offers 7,200 hours or more of on-the-job training, trade theory and academic study, culminating in an applied science degree in applied trades and a journeyman job in the shipyard.

Classes are taught in a Honolulu Community College facility on the yard. Jobs are available in structural, mechanical, electrical/electronic engineering, piping, air conditioning and refrigeration and other trades.  Qualified and motivated apprentice program graduates can pursue a four-year degree through the Apprentice to Engineer program.

Lauryn-Mae Pang was working several jobs when she found out about the PHNSY & IMF apprentice program. She wanted more than assorted jobs: She wanted a career. She applied, was accepted and completed the apprentice program, becoming a diesel mechanic in the shipyard’s crane shop. Pang took advantage of the Apprentice to Engineer program and went on to receive a Bachelor of Science from the University of Hawaii. She is now serving as a nuclear mechanical engineer at the shipyard.

“Some of the people coming into the apprenticeship programs are looking for structure. We give them an educational program with academic standards and teach them a trade with performance standards they have to adhere to,” Snell said. “They grow in that environment. And the next thing you know, they’re leaders in the shipyard.”

When the Perseverance rover landed on Mars on Feb. 18, cheers and applause filled mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the crowd celebrating was Matt Wallace, who as a young naval submarine officer plied the depths of the seas before journeying into a long career exploring space and the vast unknowns of the Red Planet.

Wallace had faced similar stress the day Perseverance was launched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas Rocket V that blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 30, 2020. As the Mars 2020 deputy project manager and then project manager, he helped guide the rover’s mission to further explore Mars. He knew the planet well, starting as a power systems engineer on the Mars Pathfinder Sojourner vehicle and later working on the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rover missions.

But landing Perseverance was just as exciting and nerve wracking.

“That’s the thing you worry the most about. It’s so complex, and Mars always throws a surprise at you,” he said. “It was a big moment for everybody. Having been in this program as long as anybody, it was a particularly proud moment for me.”

The project team includes 2,000 people in Pasadena at JPL, a research and development center funded by NASA and managed by Caltech and more than 1,000 contractors around the country. “It’s been exciting and gratifying, both for me and for the team to understand that what they do is important,” Wallace said, adding, “I’m very, very proud.”

The team includes about 20 military veterans. “They really come to the table with a lot of great skills and great focus,” he said. “They tend to fit in very well. A lot of what we do requires teamwork.”

Wallace is particularly heartened by the broad public support and global interest in the Mars mission.

“The level of public excitement is off the charts,” he said, compared to Sojourner, the first to land and capture images of Mars’ dry, rock-strewn red landscape. “I think people are coming out of this year of COVID, and they’re looking for something that everyone can cheer for.” They include his former academy classmates.

“I heard from every single one of my 19th Company classmates,” Wallace, a 1984 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, said with a chuckle. “It had been on the news here and there, and people caught that.” He also appeared in a May 2020 CBS “60 Minutes” segment about the Mars launch and in the academy’s magazine.

Naval Interests

Wallace was just a toddler when the first U.S. attempts to reach Mars succeeded when the spacecraft Mariner 4 took grainy photographs of craters on its surface. As a young boy, he watched the televised Apollo missions to the moon and read books by Ray Bradbury, whose collection of science fiction writings includes “The Martian Chronicles” series about Mars and Martian life.

His father served in the U.S. Air Force, and while growing up around the Washington, D.C., area, Wallace listened to stories about the military, including one about a successful submerged trek under the North Pole by the nuclear-powered submarine USS Nautilus (SSN-571). “It intrigued me,” he recalled, and considerations about military service led to the Naval Academy.

“I just kind of fit into the Navy’s nuclear power program,” he said. At the academy, he got involved in telerobotics, which furthered his interest in space and is key to NASA’s space programs, including Mars.

Wallace graduated with a degree in systems engineering and, after initial training, reported to the Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Albuquerque (SSN 706) at Naval Submarine Base New London, Connecticut.

The nuclear-powered submarine was relatively new, having commissioned into the fleet in 1983. But it was the Cold War, and the crew and boat stayed busy training and operating at sea. “It didn’t feel like training a lot of the time,” he said. “It felt like preparation. We had a very high op tempo … 75% op tempo.”

Still, he said, “I loved it. I really enjoyed it. I was single, and I could spend 75% of my time at sea and one of three days on ship when we were in port.”

Wallace was drawn to the boat’s engineering and mechanics. “The submarine is a very complex system,” he said, “and you have to learn all the engineering and reactor systems and qualify” in areas including weapons, communications, navigation and sensors. “I really enjoyed that multidiscipline.”

He learned about leadership, starting off with a small radar team, and the need for people with technical expertise who can operate well under pressure and as a team. “You absolutely have to figure out how to stay calm [and] make good decisions when everything is falling apart,” he said.

It also taught him how to work with a diversity of people. “Your crew comes from all different backgrounds across the country,” he said. “I had to understand that really quickly as a JO [junior officer] on a submarine and figure out how to make that connection.

“That part of my career was so informative and so important to me,” he said of his five years in the Navy, which provided him “a lot of skills that I still use today.”

From Sub to Space

Wallace received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and was attracted to the challenge of space missions that demand people skilled in problem-solving, innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, so he landed work at JPL. He joined engineers and scientists tackling the problems and challenges of space flight to Mars and found similarities from his time undersea.

“The ocean is not always a friendly environment. There’s danger lurking in the ocean, especially when you are training to be in a highly unsafe environment,” he said. “Space is very much the same,” with dangers from radiation, cold temperatures, dust and loss of communications, and “they both require very highly reliable engineering systems.”

After Sojourner, Wallace led the assembly and test team for the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity missions that landed on Mars in 2004, and was a flight system manager for the 2012 Curiosity mission. Much like the military, the Mars project “feels like another way to serve,” he said. “It’s something bigger than just doing the job, to be doing something with a lasting influence … for the future. And that’s what exploration is about. It’s about learning things you don’t know.

“It’s a hard business,’ he added. “It’s a very challenging domain to work in, like the military. This is not a 9-to-5 job. There is no textbook you can get to tell you know to land on Mars.”

Ancient Life

Discovery and science — specifically astrobiology — are at the heart of the Mars mission to search for ancient microbial life that may have existed 3 billion years ago. “I was intrigued by the challenge …  and the notion of looking for ancient life on Mars,” Wallace said. “At first, it seemed like a very unlikely technical rationale for going to the planet.”

But Curiosity found evidence of liquid water on Mars, with a neutral pH pointing to a once-habitable environment. “We are very seriously looking for evidence that life evolved on Mars at the same time that life was evolving on Earth. To me, that is just such a fundamental, transformational, scientific conclusion to learn that life could have evolved somewhere other than Earth.”

Perseverance landed in the Jezero Crater, which NASA scientists think was once a river delta, for a planned two-year exploration. With the autonomous helicopter Ingenuity, the rover on June 9 began its scientific work exploring and collecting dust, dirt and rocks that might contain microbes. Those samples, placed into 43 titanium tubes, are the reason for the next big mission to bring them to Earth for analysis and research.

NASA and the European Space Agency are working on that return mission, launching a spacecraft to Mars in 2026 at the earliest. “There’s an interesting crossover coming up. In order to get the samples off the surface of Mars, we have to essentially launch a small rocket into orbit, and it looks a lot like a surface-to-air missile,” Wallace said. For the development of that rocket, already underway, “we’ve been talking about which aspects of the industrial community and the military community could help with that.”

New Posting

On June 7, Wallace ended his tour as Mars 2020 project manager and became JPL’s deputy director for planetary science.

“From Sojourner to Spirit and Opportunity to Curiosity to Perseverance, Matt has played key roles in the design, construction and operations of every Mars rover NASA has ever built,” Jennifer Trosper, the new project manager, said in a June 9 NASA news article. “And while the project is losing a great leader and trusted friend, we know Matt will continue making great things happen for the planetary science community.”

Wallace is particularly excited about one mission, the Europa Clipper, an orbital spacecraft under development that will travel to Jupiter and study its mysterious, icy moon to look for signs of life. Clipper, expected to launch in 2024, could help identify ice and water, according to NASA. It’s no easy mission as the planet’s high radiation levels will require armored equipment and systems.

Another mission is the August 2022 launch of a spacecraft to the asteroid Psyche in the belt between Mars and Jupiter in the hope of new insights into how Earth and other planets formed. It’s expected to begin circling the asteroid and begin sending imagery and scientific data sometime in 2026.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Wallace said of his new role. “There’s a lot of great staff in the planetary sciences directorate … and a lot of research and development.”

Sailors and Marines worked together with unmanned technologies, never used before to conduct expeditionary mine countermeasures operations, during the recent Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) 2021 exercise in Germany.

Tony Brescia, a systems engineer with the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division at Patuxent River, Maryland, brought new and innovative technologies to BALTOPS 2021 to let warfighters experiment with the systems during a major exercise.

Brescia has been working with Arizona-based Hydronalix on developing its unmanned systems platforms and technologies through investments from the Navy’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. Brescia has worked with the company to successfully transition its Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard (EMILY) USV, which is used for lifesaving, and the sonar-equipped version used for underwater surveys.

That work has evolved into two new platforms — the Amy and Nix USVs and a small unmanned aerial vehicle called Adapt, capable of carrying small payloads such as water bottles, food or medicine.

“It’s scalable. By upscaling the propeller and motor combination, it can carry a bigger payload,” Brescia said of Adapt. “It’s a short-range, one-way disposable UAS. You tell it where to go on your smart device and the autopilot will take it there.”

EMILY, Amy, Nix and Adapt

The Marines took advantage of BALTOPS to evaluate the new technologies and the characteristics of the different systems, such as weight, range, payload and power. 

“End-user feedback goes long way to set priorities,” Brescia said, “and to help us be sure we’re investing in the right technologies.”

According to Master Sgt. Matt Jackson, an explosive ordnance disposal technician with the Camp Pendleton-based USMC 4th Platoon Littoral Explosive Ord­nance Neutralization (LEON) team at BALTOPS, the exercise gave the Marines the chance to use unmanned systems designed for explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) to detect explosive hazards in the littorals, but they can also provide commanders with information using unmanned systems.

“There’s a lot of things these sensors collect that can be federated up to higher echelons,” he said.

Jackson said the Marines used EMILY with the side-scan sonar to detect anomalies in very shallow water. But, while EMILY may be too small for Marine Corps EOD, Jackson said the larger Amy has the size and form factor to load up with sensors and acoustic, satellite and radio frequency communications gear to link divers and unmanned systems to the greater mesh network.

“We want to be able to tie that all together, from the undersea node all the way to space and to the command and operations control,” he said.

Jackson envisions using a second Amy to tow a magnetometer in the surf zone to “search the sea bottom to give a heat map of metallic signatures, so I know where to avoid, as well as a side-scan sonar towed under the surface to get bathymetric data such as depth and water temperature. That’s valuable information.”

When it comes to mines, on the beach or in the water approaching the beach, the Marines are a breaching force, not a mine clearance force. “We want to avoid any mines while our small units are trying to get ashore,” Jackson said.

Nix is a relatively small USV that can carry a large volume.

“It has the capability to float an amount of weight. You can autonomously send it somewhere with gear, food, batteries, medical supplies or sensors,” Jackson said. “For LEON, it’s a little bit on the large size, because we have to operate from small boats. But we can tow it behind a boat, and then send it off when we get near its destination.” 

While many navies use USVs for environmental sensing and mine hunting, few navies have general-purpose USVs that can be used for general tasks. EOD is a just one niche in the Marine Corps. According to Jackson, there could be many uses for these vehicles.

“By demonstrating these systems for the Marine Corps, there may be other Marines out there who will say, ‘Amy can work for us, too.’ It could be for signals, recording, jamming or whatever. The same goes for Nix. Marines will find things to put in and move around in something like Nix.”

Brescia described Nix as a “mini-connector” to haul 80 to 100 pounds of critical repair parts, food, water or ammo. “It’s large enough to have a hybrid power supply, not just batteries, so it can stay out there for a long period of time.”

Cheap Sensors Needed

Marines have been brought into a distributed maritime environment where they will be operating under a composite warfare command, with their own connectors and working as a stand-in force within a weap­ons engagement zone. That means below the threshold of conflict, the Marine Corps will be a persistent sensor for the Navy to deter or curb maligned behavior.

“We need to understand the underwater domain, and we need tools to sense things in it,” Jackson said. “We want to support our Marines organically to survey those waters in the littorals, and also feed the Navy with intelligence to paint a better picture for the overall fleet. It’s a capacity problem. To really conduct Distributed Maritime Operations, we need more sensors.” 

That means the need to have effective and affordable systems that can be acquired and deployed in large numbers, which fits systems such as EMILY, Amy, Nix and Adapt.

Hydronalix CEO Tony Mulligan said the company’s unmanned systems are easy to use. Sailors or Marines only require a few minutes of training to be able to send off an Adapt drone using a smart phone app from a ship offshore, for example, to an exact spot on the beach or a person in need.

“There’s no pilot. There’s no ground station. There’s not even a radio. If a Corpsman needs to send plasma or morphine to a unit ashore three miles away, he loads the drone, clicks on where he wants it to land and it flies right to that location. If an area has been devastated by an earthquake or a storm, and there are not safe places for helicopters to land, these drones could be used to deliver water or food to isolated or damaged areas,” Mulligan said.

“You can be helping people before the helicopters get there, or for those victims in smaller numbers that might not be the top priority for the relief teams.”

While they are reusable, and could be recovered, reloaded and sent off again, Mulligan said they are cheap enough so that it doesn’t matter if they don’t come back.

The Port of Virginia is something of a little-understood region on the nation’s vast maritime map, and yet is one of the busiest, most strategically important ports in the nation.

Located at Hampton Roads, it ranks seventh among North America’s largest ports, with five major terminals (compared to 25 at the Port of Los Angeles, the largest, and probably best-known port). It’s a neighbor to the world’s largest naval base, Naval Station Norfolk.

Like much of the nation’s maritime infrastructure, the general public often doesn’t see the mighty industrial lifting done at a port like the Port of Virginia, which employs nearly 400,000 people directly and indirectly and contributes about $92 billion annually to Virginia’s economy. 

Its public profile could increase over time, not least due to the ever-expanding economy in the Mid-Atlantic region that has resulted in a 2.6% compounded annual growth rate since 2015, according to data from the Port of Virginia’s 2020 Annual Report. The primary drivers of Virginia’s transformative growth — which translates into more cargo, new jobs and bigger regional investments — is the arrival or expansion of multinational companies like Amazon, engineering giant Navien and Acesur, which specializes in IT and enterprise security.

Coast Guard Oversight

The 5th District of the U.S. Coast Guard, which has four sectors stretching from New Jersey to South Carolina, advises on how to accommodate this economic growth while making sure the waterways are also safe for traditional maritime uses.

Rear Adm. Laura M. Dickey, 5th District commander, says there have been a host of changes in Virginia and the rest of the region, from adapting to massive container ships to dealing with renewable energy needs and climate-related initiatives.

“There is a tremendous amount going on across the district,” Dickey told Seapower. “In addition to our normal Coast Guard missions, we are really seeing an explosion of growth in the maritime transportation system, in the ports and in trying to keep up with that, making sure that the traditional uses of the waterways, and these new uses — or these growing uses — will work in concert with each other.

“And then where is our role in that? [We are] making sure that we’re prepared for these changes that we’re seeing, and doing our part to evaluate them, and doing so in a holistic way that integrates all the different aspects of what happens in a port, or the approaches to our ports from offshore.”

Dickey said the Coast Guard team in the 5th District is adapting much like their maritime partners to new uses of the waterways, including offshore renewable energy initiatives — mainly wind farms — and, to a lesser extent, preparations for sea level rise.

With new construction in the region, for example, the Coast Guard is tasked with examining these projects and their parameters. It’s more of an advisory role rather than a regulatory or law enforcement capacity, an important distinction given the cross-section of different interest groups and government agencies.   

“The Port of Virginia is going through some amazing expansion, [and] there is a tremendous amount of activity going on,” Dickey said. “We have our traditional [missions] but we also have some unchartered territory and this explosive growth that all has to be harmonized … so that these activities in these ports happen safely and are done in a way that supports the economy but also takes into consideration all of the other traditional uses of our waterways.”

Dickey said wind farms are at the center of new development throughout the 5th District. There are at least eight projects in development potentially in the Mid-Atlantic region. In Virginia, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is in its initial phase. Located about 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, the pilot project consists of two 12-megawatt turbines that cost about $300 million and are expected to generate enough electricity to power 3,000 homes. It is the second off­shore wind farm operation in the United States after Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island.

“Wind farms are huge,” Dickey said. “It is an emerging area, and it is one where the Coast Guard is not responsible for signing off on the permit, but we do play a role in advising the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and others. Our role is to review the projects and see how they fit with traditional uses of the waterways to make sure that we are able to do our own missions.”

The Coast Guard works with multiple partners, interest groups and fellow federal agencies on wind farm programs, having done so in the Northeast for more than two decades to support the construction of wind farms in Block Island and Nantucket Sound (the latter was rejected by local interest groups in 2017). Communication, transparency and sharing knowledge are the key to successfully executing such projects.

“If you have wind farms that are too close together, can you still do search and rescue properly in there, or do they run into traditional fisheries grounds, or are they in the way of traditional or necessary fairways so that commerce can come in and out?” Dickey said.

“There are an awful lot of these projects. It is the wave of the future, and it is something that we are having to rapidly adjust to make sure that we’re looking at things in a holistic way. We are working with headquarters and everybody to make sure that we come up with a process that is repeatable and standardized in a sense but is also flexible to adjust to the particulars of each project.”

Dickey cited several port deepening projects, among them the Ports of Wilmington, North Carolina and Delaware Bay, where ongoing deepening and dredging of ports and harbors is essential for handling the increasingly larger container vessels coming daily through the port to one of the area terminals.

Dickey described a constant cycle of challenges in keeping up with growing trade volume at the Port of Virginia, which is the No. 1 exporter of vegetables and soybean products, and a leader in recycled wastepaper and animal feed exports.

Fewer, but Larger, Ships

In late May of this year, the CMA CGM Marco Polo, the largest container ship to call on a U.S. East Coast port, arrived at Virginia International Gateway, marking a milestone for the Port of Virginia. The vessel is nearly 1,300 feet long and can carry 16,022 20-foot equivalent units.

“[Trade] is such a huge part of our economy and globalization and the Coast Guard has got to make sure that it happens safely, and how do we do that,” said Dickey. “The Coast Guard is agnostic on all of this. Our job is to make sure that maritime activity occurs safely and is deconflicted.” 

Also underway are tunnel and road expansions at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and with the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (HRBT) Expansion Project. In a ground­breaking ceremony in October 2020, officials kicked off the $3.8 billion HRBT Expansion Project, which will add twin, two-lane bored tunnels and widen portions of Virginia’s Interstate 64 to reduce congestion and ease access to the Port of Virginia and Naval Station Norfolk. The project, which gets underway in 2022, is the largest infrastructure project in the commonwealth’s history. 

“The [projects] are going on across the Mid-Atlantic region as these ports all try to remain competitive,” Dickey said. “It is an interesting thing where the volume of ships goes down because [the vessels] are able to carry so much more. But you need to accommodate these large ships, and what does that do for the safety of ships as they try to pass each other in channels? Does it shut down things?”

Dickey said her team in the 5th District is doing is Port Access Route Studies, or PARS, which ensure, in part, that new projects and construction are integrated with the potential future uses of areas.

“How do we make sure that the waterways and approaches to our ports are deconflicted with all the different types of things that people want to do?” Dickey said.

“We are reviewing the access to ports. How do we get ships moving in and out of our ports and navigating here in the safest manner, and then what is the impact of a wind farm? Where can those even be permitted to be leased, [and] does that fit with access to the ports? That entails outreach to all the stakeholders, whether that is private industry, the DoD, recreational users, commercial fishing users and environmental groups,” she said.

“We are well postured, because we are very tightly [linked with] our port partners in each location. We have area maritime steering committees and consulta­tive groups where we know most of the folks, so we get a sense of what’s going on and what the impact might be, and then we take a look at these projects.”

MIAMI — Coast Guard and partner agency aircrews continue to respond to critically injured Haitian citizens by transporting them to a higher level of care in Port au Prince, Haiti, the Coast Guard 7th District said in an Aug. 19 release. 

After several days of responding to a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in Haiti, Coast Guard aircrews returned home to Clearwater, Florida, Thursday, and more Coast Guard aircrews are returning to the response. 

“We are proud, but we are also a little heartbroken,” said Petty Officer 3rd Class Michael Diglio, a rescue swimmer deployed to Haiti. “The Haitian citizens are strong, as they would ride in the helicopter calm and composed throughout the one-hour ride to the Port au Prince hospital.” 

In the past 24 hours, Coast Guard men and women deployed to Haiti have flown 37 evolutions, saved more than 33 people, assisted more than 58 people, transported 49 urban disaster and relief personnel, and transported 1,700 pounds of disaster and relief supplies. 

Since Sunday, Coast Guard men and women deployed to Haiti have flown 137 evolutions, saved 116 people, assisted 177 people, transported 234 urban disaster and relief personnel, and transported 8,500 pounds of disaster and relief supplies.