ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. Navy’s submarine force is in high demand worldwide and is in the midst of a very high operations tempo (optempo), a Navy senior admiral said. 

“Navy leaders, fleet commanders, combatant commanders have high expectations for us,” said Adm. Frank Caldwell, director of the Navy’s Nuclear Power Program, speaking Nov. 16 in a webinar for the annual symposium of the naval Submarine League. “They love what we bring to peacetime operations and they are absolutely counting on us and our warfighting capability and our readiness to execute those wartime responsibilities.  

“We are a force that’s in very high demand,” Caldwell said. “In fact, all of the maritime commanders want a lot more of what the submarine force can bring and what we bring to the undersea domain. Our team is out there every single day doing eye-watering work on submarine missions or on patrols. The deployed OpTempo is very high right now and our boats and our crews are stepping up to the challenge. This is true even in the midst of COVID, which has put friction in the entire system, whether it’s from building new-construction submarines, delivering boats from deep maintenance, or simply executing the operational schedule. 

The admiral said there “has been a strain on our families and on our crews. But through it all I have been really impressed with the way our submarine commanders have kept their crews safe and continued to meet deployed operational commitments not only for missions but also for strategic deterrent patrols.”  

In addition to a high optempo, the submarine force also is in a construction boom at a level not seen in two decades, he said.  

“We are building submarines at rates that we have not seen in over 20 years,” Caldwell said. “The new-construction build halls are full and more facilities are under construction. We have modern, high-end fixturing that allows us to hold large components in place and allow high-precision, automated cutting and welding. While submarine construction in the 1980s and 1990s relied on retaining large openings in the hull in order to insert components and equipment, today we are building more and more components on rafts or on modules, long before we slide them together into the hull to complete the submarine.” 

Caldwell said the Navy “strives to keep the individual construction efforts on a steady, uninterrupted drumbeat. We refer to this as continuous build … capitalizing on the work force learning to build more efficiently, to reduce construction timeline, and continue to gain efficiency as we go forward.” 

ARLINGTON, Va. — The commander of the U.S. Navy’s submarine forces said the service’s submarine community is looking at several options for the basis of the next-generation nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN). 

Vice Adm. Daryl Caudle, commander, Submarine Forces, speaking Nov. 16 in a webinar for the annual symposium of the naval Submarine League, said the service is looking at three options: a development of the Virginia-class SSN; a development of the Columbia-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine; and a new-from-scratch SSN design. 

“We’re going to get alternatives and make decisions on how to make this new SSN match what we need to stay ahead of our peers,” Caudle said. 

Caudle discussed some characteristics and capabilities that would be desirable in the next SSN. Increased speed is one characteristic he said is a requirement. 

“Speed is basically important to every improve every single joint warfare function,” he said. Speed “plays out so well in all of our wargaming [because] it helps compensate for bad decisions. It also helps us get to the fight faster and helps sustain an all-domain maneuver warfare.”   

The admiral said, “We can never get enough payload capacity, so we do want submarines with large payload capacity.” 

He also said that stealth is important and not limited to acoustic stealth, but across all spectrums. 

“When this new SSN rolls out, we’re going to have peer competitors that are going to be able to detect us not just acoustically but through algorithms that are going to break the water interface.”  

Caudle stressed that the Navy would have to make research and development investments to achieve the characteristics desired in the new SSN.   

ARLINGTON, Va. —The admiral who sponsors the resources for the U.S. Navy’s information warfare operations said the modern warfare environment is increasingly governed by the speed of information and its effects on decision-making. 

“It is all about speed for advantage,” said Vice Adm. Jeffrey E. Trussler, deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence, speaking Nov. 13 at a webinar on the website of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The event was sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and Huntington Ingalls Industries. 

“One hundred, 200 years ago it was pretty slow-moving,” Trussler said. “Over the last hundred years that [advantage] has slowly whittled away and become much shorter. Now that we’re in the information age, the information advantage you might hold could be a mere matter of minutes or even seconds. … It’s about understanding the domain as never before” from the seabed to space. 

“Depending on where you are, the time of day, the environmental conditions, you may be offered advantages if you know how to take advantage of them, or the enemy may be subject to some disadvantages if you know how to exploit them.” 

Information warfare has arisen to such importance in naval operations that there is now an Information Warfare Commander assigned to each carrier strike group on par with other composite warfare commanders such as the air warfare, undersea warfare, surface warfare, and strike warfare commanders in the strike group. 

“Those windows of opportunity might be very short,” said the admiral, a submariner. “The ability to take advantage … it’s all about speed, it’s about the precision of information you get. … And the volume that comes in. More importantly, those things also offer vulnerabilities. It also requires the speed of decision. So, it’s not about accumulating a lot of great information. If you don’t act on it in an appropriate amount of time, that decision advantage you may have with the information you have it may just go away.” 

Trussler said the speed of information “requires leaders who are going to take advantage of this. And I hope we’re evolving toward that as the information flows, the opportunity flows, those windows that can be offered into the physical environment or the RF spectrum of slight opportunities, that’s when decisions have to be made and taken advantage of before that advantage of information is lost.” 

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Navy has ordered a second lot of Leonardo TH-73A training helicopters from the company’s U.S. operation, AgustaWestland. 

The Naval Air Systems Command has awarded AgustaWestland a $171.0 million firm-fixed-price contract modification to exercise an option for 36 TH-73As as part of the Advanced Helicopter Training System Program, according to a Nov. 12 Defense Department contract announcement. Fiscal 2021 funds were allocated for the contract modification. 

The first production lot of 32 TH-73As was ordered in January 2020 with a contract award for $176.5 million, which included initial spare parts, dedicated equipment and specific pilot and maintenance training services. 

The TH-73A will replace the Bell TH-57B/C SeaRanger helicopter in Training Air Wing Five at Naval Air Station Whiting Field, Florida, in training rotary-wing pilots for the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. 

The TH-73A is a variant of the commercial Leonardo TH-119 helicopter. 

ARLINGTON, Va. — The secretary of the Navy and chief of naval operations announced on Nov. 13 the following flag assignments: 

Rear Adm. Alvin Holsey will be assigned as commander, Navy Personnel Command; and deputy chief of naval personnel, Millington, Tennessee.  Holsey is currently serving as special assistant to commander, Naval Air Forces/commander, Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, with additional duty as director, Task Force One Navy, Washington, D.C. 

Rear Adm. (lower half) Richard J. Cheeseman Jr. will be assigned as commander, Carrier Strike Group Ten, Norfolk, Virginia.  Cheeseman is currently serving as commander, Carrier Strike Group Two, Norfolk, Virginia.  

Rear Adm. (lower half) Brendan R. McLane will be assigned as commander, Navy Warfare Development Command, Norfolk, Virginia.  McLane is currently serving as commander, Carrier Strike Group Ten, Norfolk, Virginia.  

Rear Adm. (lower half) Scott F. Robertson will be assigned as commander, Carrier Strike Group Two, Norfolk, Virginia.  Robertson is currently serving as commander, Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center, San Diego, California.  

ARLINGTON, Va. — As the Navy pushes the efforts to reduce the days of maintenance delays to ships in maintenance, the achievement of on-time delivery of ships from their maintenance availabilities in itself will help alleviate shortages in shipyard capacity, said the commander of Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). 

Vice Adm. William Galinis, the NAVSEA commander, speaking to the Defense Writers Group during a Nov. 12 webinar, listed as his No. 1 priority the on-time delivery of ships, submarines and systems, including new construction vessels and those going through maintenance and modernization availabilities. 

Galinis said, “getting after the planning piece” right and ensuring that long-lead materials are ordered and received on time goes a long way to being ready to execute construction or maintenance when a ship comes in the yard for an availability. 

“We’ve got maintenance issues within some of our repair yards and in some phases of our new-construction yards that we have to get after,” Galinis said. “We’re working with industry on how we get after that. If you get ships through the shipyards on the plan that you initially envisioned, that in itself will free up capacity.” 

The admiral said, “there are shipyards out there that we have not fully tapped into. There’s an opportunity to bring other shipyards into the mix on the maintenance side.” 

He said his command is looking at the maintenance capacity “inside the public yards and how much of that work do we really need to push out to the private sector. Our private-sector submarine yards are interested in that type of work. Whet we need to do is show a good requirement and what the workload would look like.” 

The Navy improved its ship maintenance backlog in fiscal 2020 over 2019, reducing days of maintenance delay lost ship days from more than 7,000 to about 1,000, Galinis said, an 80% improvement, though because of some re-baselining the percentage “is closer to 40% with the original baseline,” he said. 

“We’re not going to get to zero in 2021,” he said, but noted the improvement in performance was positive and that “60% to 70% of availabilities were tracking to on-time delivery.” 

He said there was a handful of ships — including four Ticonderoga-class cruisers in the Cruiser Modernization Program and the fire-damaged Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Oscar Austin — that were delayed significantly and skewing the days of maintenance delays metric. He said the Navy is going to re-baseline the Cruiser Modernization program.     

MCLEAN, Va. — BAE Systems has been awarded contracts worth more than $30 million to produce and integrate a mission-critical information warfare platform for U.S Navy vessels to help Sailors execute their missions and remain connected while at sea, the company said in a Nov. 11 release.  

The U.S Navy has issued two task orders for Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise Services (CANES) for two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, a Virginia-class submarine, and two Blue Ridge-class command ships.  

“These two task orders permit us to continue our high-quality, high volume production and integration service, assembling and delivering CANES to the Navy safely and affordably,” said Mark Keeler, vice president and general manager of BAE Systems’ Integrated Defense Solutions business. “CANES takes advantage of commercial-off-the-shelf insertion, which brings operational agility to the warfighter and savings to the U.S. Navy.” 

Under the first task order from the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) San Diego, BAE Systems will produce fully integrated CANES racks for two command ships, which are expected to be completed by February 2022. Under the second task order, the company will produce fully integrated CANES racks for two destroyers and a submarine, which are expected to be completed by March 2022. Work will be performed at BAE Systems’ 281,000 square-foot state-of-the-art production facility in Summerville, South Carolina.   

CANES consolidates and enhances five existing legacy network programs and it serves as a single support framework for all command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) applications that require dedicated infrastructure to operate.  

PATUXENT RIVER, Md. – The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) recently acquired a logistics Unmanned Air System (UAS) prototype to demonstrate long-range naval ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore cargo transport at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, NAWCAD said in a Nov. 9 release. 

Delivered in late October, NAWCAD engineers, testers and military test pilots are now evaluating the commercially procured air vehicle – dubbed Blue Water Maritime Logistics UAS – and tailoring it to requirements set by Military Sealift (MSC) and Fleet Forces Command (FFC). 

“The Blue Water logistics UAS will be further developed and tested by the Navy, for the Navy,” said NAWCAD Commander Rear Adm. John Lemmon. “NAWCAD has organic talent and facilities you can’t find anywhere else. Combined with increased acquisition freedom granted by Congress, this effort shows how we’re doing business differently.” 

“This requirement is unlike other cargo requirements that online retailers like Amazon are exploring,” said Blue Water’s project lead, Bill Macchione. “Naval cargo transport requires vehicles that can successfully operate through difficult environments that include heavy winds, open water and pitching vessels at sea.” 

Historic data from Navy casualty reports show that warships that move to non-mission capable or partially mission capable status often do so due to logistics-related issues like electronics parts or assemblies – 90% of which are logistical deliveries weighing less than 50 pounds. Currently, tactical aircraft like the H-60 helicopter and V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft fly these missions. 

Recognizing the cost and inefficiency of using these aircraft in missions that could be completed by Group-3 size UAS, MSC tapped NAWCAD to demonstrate an ability for an autonomous vehicle to fly these logistics missions. 

The warfare center solicited industry to demonstrate potentially viable platforms that existed commercially. Industry was required to prove its UAV could autonomously transport a 20-pound payload to a moving ship 25 miles away without refueling. Of over 65 UAS platforms that were analyzed, two systems were technically advanced enough to partially meet the difficult requirements. 

“We planned the demo during NAWCAD’s first Advanced Naval Technology Test Exercise in 2019 because we wanted to test the systems in a realistic and simulated forward-deployed environment,” said Macchione. “NAWCAD engineers and pilots observed and provided honest naval assessment based on which system was easiest to operate and maintain, had solid design, and required least modification for the mission.” 

Based on the systems’ performance at the Pax River demonstration in 2019, NAWCAD selected the Group-3 Skyways platform as the Texas-based company’s small UAS has the necessary size, payload capacity, and range potential to function in a maritime environment and allow incremental test by NAWCAD with supporting technologies that might ultimately meet the needs of MSC. 

The platform’s arrival to NAWCAD’s unmanned Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (UX) 24 is the start of civilian and military training, and subsequent system development will better meet MSC’s requirement. 

“NAWCAD intends to work with the contractor to create a better fit with the environment where it could potentially operate,” said Macchione. “We’re excited to get to work on such innovations as folding wings for better handling and ship storage, a dual propulsion system that runs on both electricity and JP-5 [fuel], an internal versus external cargo capacity, and an automatic dependent surveillance broadcast identification system.” 

Once NAWCAD fine-tunes the system, Blue Water will head to the Atlantic for experimentation with the fleet through most of 2021. 

“Results of the technical feasibility and technology demonstration efforts conducted will be shared and used to discuss transition to support fleet initiatives,” said James Tomasic, Blue Water’s co-lead and experimentation engineer. “Culmination of the effort with the Fleet during a Naval Warfare Development Command experiment later this year will provide pertinent information for the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, which determines requirements and future force structures for the Department of the Navy.” 

BELOIT, Wis.—Fairbanks Morse will supply the Ship Service Diesel Generator (SSDG) sets for the electric power generation system aboard the U.S. Navy’s newest America-class amphibious assault warship, LHA-9, the company said in a Nov. 10 release. Construction of the SSDGs will begin in 2021 and delivery to the shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries in Pascagoula, Miss. will start in 2023. 

The LHA ships, the largest of all amphibious warfare ships, take more than five years to build and are 844 feet long with a 106-foot beam displacing more than 44,000 tons. The U.S. Navy depends on Fairbanks Morse’s battle-tested diesel engines for marine propulsion and mission-critical ship electrical services whether on routine, humanitarian or belligerent missions. 

“Marine engines and power generation for today’s high-tech armed forces requires manufacturing excellence and technical innovation that never fails,” said George Whittier, chief executive officer of Fairbanks Morse. “In a globalized world with growing demand for energy, we are proud to continue our partnership with the U.S. Navy and Huntington Ingalls Industries to ensure the highest standards of critical power support at sea and to help America’s service men and women carry out their missions at home and abroad.” 

The Navy currently has a requirement for 38 amphibious ships, including 12 amphibious assault ships such as the America-class LHAs. With tight budgetary constraints and an even more dire need for submarines, the production of the LHA-9 represents a critical addition to the nation’s global fleet.  

Like other ships in the fleet, including its predecessors, USS America (LHA 6), USS Tripoli (LHA 7), and USS Bougainville (LHA-8), LHA-9 will be equipped with a diesel engine-driven electrical power generation system, which provides ship service power and also drives two induction-type auxiliary propulsion motors which power the ship’s propeller drive shaft. The hybrid-electric propulsion systems use a gas turbine engine as well as an electric motor powered by the diesel generators. The electric motors propel the ship at speeds up to around 12 knots and the generators also produce power for the ship’s electrical services. 

Today, Fairbanks Morse engines are installed on approximately 80% of U.S. Navy ships that have a medium-speed power application. The U.S. Navy has turned to Fairbanks Morse for more than seven decades to provide quality diesel engines for marine propulsion and ship service systems. 

The U.S. Navy Department’s Education for Seapower Strategy is on track to roll out its first major project in 2021, a community college to improve intellectual development and military professionalism among enlisted personnel.

The U.S. Naval Community College (NCC), aimed at turning enlisted members of the sea services into critical thinkers as well as better warfighters, is preparing to launch a pilot program in January with upwards of 500 Sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen.

The pilot will work with civilian universities and colleges to deliver distance learning in subjects such as nuclear engineering, cybersecurity, data analytics, ethics and leadership. Eventually, the NCC will offer a common core of Naval/Maritime studies to provide participants with a similar grounding to the standardized naval science courses taught at the U.S. Naval Academy and Naval ROTC programs, according to NCC President Randi Cosentino.

“The idea is that we will deliver the naval and warfighting components of our academic programs, and we will partner with top colleges and universities that deliver exceptional online programs and outcomes in the program areas in which they excel,” Cosentino explained in a recent email exchange with Seapower.

More than 100 institutions have expressed interest in working with the NCC. The goal is to narrow that down to six to 10 core college and university partners, explained Cosentino, who was appointed NCC’s first president in April. Prior to that, she was chief academic officer at Guild Education, which works with Fortune 500 companies like Disney and Walmart to provide college-level education and training to their workforces.

Cosentino, who has a doctorate in higher education administration from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A from Harvard University, said the pilot has two purposes, first to place naval students in the best online programs in the country delivered over modern learning systems. Secondly, to learn about successful course and program completion as the USNCC matures.

A second pilot, with as many as 5,000 students, is planned for 2022, with classes to begin in the Summer/Fall timeframe. That pilot will enroll students in targeted associate degree programs at several partner institutions. Feedback from that pilot will help finalize NCC’s approach to student support, partnerships with colleges and universities and delivery mechanisms to make sure the new school can achieve its mission.

That mission “is to produce graduates steeped in naval traditions and values, who have sound ethical decision-making abilities, possess improved critical thinking skills, and possess a deeper understanding of the complex global maritime environment in which they operate,” Cosentino told Seapower.

Following the lead of the 2018 National  Defense Strategy, which declared professional military education has “stagnated,” both Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger’s Planning Guidance and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday’s January 2019 Frago (fragmentary change) order  stressed the need for learning as a warfare enabler.