The U.S. Navy's effort to develop and field the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) got more focused after the July 11 establishment of a single program executive office that combined ship and mission module development efforts under a single leader. Rear Adm. James Murdoch, a previous director of the LCS ship development office, is the new PEO LCS, returning after about a year of working on fleet maintenance.
Despite the recent award of several construction contracts for both LCS variants, the program remains under occasional fire from congressional opponents, spurred by high costs, program decisions sometimes seen as hasty, reports of corrosion on Austal USA's USS Independence (LCS 2), and superstructure and weld cracks on Lockheed Martin's USS Freedom (LCS 1).
Murdoch addressed a number of issues during a July 20 interview at his Washington Navy Yard headquarters.
Q. WHAT'S YOUR ASSESSMENT OF THE LCS PROGRAM RIGHT NOW?
A. Overall, the program is pretty healthy. The shipbuilding side has reached a place where we're into the contracts we want; we're in serial production with a stable design. Mission packages, we're getting in to the test phase. The challenge now is to put it all together.
Establishing a single PEO gives an end-to-end responsibility for the warfare capability to one guy. We'll have one organization covering three big themes: getting the shipbuilding in a stable march down the learning curve; testing the mission packages with all their components and then into the ship; and introducing it into the fleet.
I recognize the concerns that recently surfaced, but frankly these are all part and parcel of the challenges in building ships, and complex ships at that. Where there are issues, we're going to assess, analyze and fix 'em.
Q. LCS 1 HAD TWO STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS: PERSISTENT CRACKING IN THE ALUMINUM SUPERSTRUCTURE AND A WELD SEAM BREACH. HAVE THOSE BEEN FIXED?
A. There was about a 6-inch crack in a weld. I'm certainly not happy with it, but this is pretty normal for a new warship design, to have some sorts of issues. My personal perspective is we probably had fewer problems with both of these ships than I might have expected, based on past Navy experience.
All ships work in a seaway. Navy ships go faster, generally speaking, so there's more potential for stress and strain.
When I was working this program earlier, I would see workers putting more scantlings, stiffeners, longitudinal frame members and so forth, into the structure. I would typically ask, "What are you guys doing?" Well, they said, "We were reviewing the design and decided that, based on structural models, we need to put a little more in here." I think actually the designs came out pretty well.
The hull crack in Freedom was in a chine area. I'm pretty confident from the summaries that this was a weld defect, didn't do it right. There are miles of linear welds on the ship and this is six inches. Once again, I'm not happy about that. We've looked at other places in the ship, haven't found any problems we need to go repair. And we've beefed the design a bit in that particular area, added some additional structure around that break point. I think the crack issue is understood; we've addressed it.
Superstructure cracking, frankly, is not uncommon, especially in ships that have aluminum superstructures. Aluminum is lighter by weight, it has the strength to hold the ship together and is more resistant to oxidation corrosion, and you don't have to paint it. But it has to be treated more carefully in terms of its fatigue life. We have the technology to get that right.
This is not something that keeps me awake at night. There are things you worry about in every job, but that's not one of them.
The corrosion that's recently resurfaced on LCS 2, we were looking for this. We've looked at it on both designs.
It's not a different mechanism of corrosion than what's taking place on [other Navy ships]. Where you have different materials used between the propellers in the water jets and the hull of the ship, you have to do a variety of things to prevent one of those metals corroding in sea water.
We made design decisions on both of these ships with regard to where to put zinc anodes, where are we going to employ impressed current cathodic protection systems. We thought we got the design pretty right, but in this and in other areas, we said, first one we built. So we're going to go in and look at them periodically.
In LCS 2, we found inside the water jet tunnels the paint surface had degraded, and we started having pitting corrosion which was obviously galvanic. So we'll put some additional aluminum plating around the water-jet tunnel area so I can continue operations until I can get her into dry dock, which was a planned evolution.
There is any number of risks, quite a few of which just didn't materialize. I had people telling me the water jet impellers would experience a lot of cavitation, degrade rapidly and not make it to the post-shakedown availability. We've gone in and inspected those, and they're behaving much more on the favorable side of the predicted model than the unfavorable side. So there are things in the design that went very well, better than expected.
I think we did a pretty fair job on this design, especially given the amount of time we took on it. We didn't get it exactly perfect, but it came out pretty well. And the areas we need to go fix are pretty fixable.
Q. COMPARED WITH LAST YEAR'S PUBLIC RELATIONS EFFORT TO SHOW OFF LCS 1, THERE HAS BEEN A DEARTH OF NEWS ABOUT THE INDEPENDENCE (LCS 2). IT'S OPERATING FROM MAYPORT, FLA., RATHER THAN THE MAIN FLEET BASE AT NORFOLK. IT HAS YET TO MAKE A SIGNIFICANT CRUISE. THERE IS ALMOST NO WORD OF ITS ACTIVITIES, FEW PHOTOS ARE RELEASED, AND AUSTAL USA, UNLIKE LOCKHEED MARTIN AND LCS 1, HAS BECOME VERY RELUCTANT TO TALK ABOUT THE SHIP. THE ONLY NEWS THAT'S OUT THERE IS ABOUT CORROSION PROBLEMS. IS LCS 2 BROKEN?
A. There's nothing wrong with LCS 2. Fair observations, I wouldn't dispute you. You could certainly draw the conclusion that you haven't heard about the ship, then, gosh, is there something wrong with it? That's why I'm here. I believe the fleet introduction of these ships is very important. When it comes to these ships, nobody cares like I care.
I guess I agree with you. LCS, in the press, has kind of gone sinker, and maybe we shouldn't have let that happen.
LCS 2 has been doing things. Vice Adm. Richard Hunt, commander of Naval Surface Forces, was on board last month. He watched them maneuver an unmanned vehicle around the mission bay, put it in the twin-boomed extensible crane, launch it from the ship. They operated it, drove it back into the recovery system, picked it up and brought it back aboard the ship. It was the first underway day he had in his new job, on the Independence. So why aren't we getting that message to you? I don't know.
Q. DO THE SHIPS' MISSION BAY HANDLING SYSTEMS WORK?
A. Not only have we launched and recovered and operated an unmanned surface vehicle, we've also recently launched and recovered the remote multimission vehicle. Handling is part of the main battery. I'm very pleased with where we are on both of these.
But we're building these ships at the affordable end of the spectrum here, so over time I expect the industry guys to get smart on these crane systems and provide me something they can procure affordably, that sailors can operate, that are reliable and maintainable.
I'm not looking for continual improvement in terms of being able to lift more weight. Both are pretty good. I'm always looking for something that makes the ship more affordable.
Q. ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT RELIABILITY ISSUES WITH EITHER HANDLING SYSTEM?
A. Not to my knowledge. Both systems are solid designs. I'm pretty confident in the systems.
Q. WHEN CAN THE FLEET EXPECT AN OPERATIONALLY EFFECTIVE, DEPLOYABLE, NON-TEST LCS WITH A MISSION MODULE?
A. By the end of 2012, I would like to have that mine warfare mission package testing over and done with. I need that to wrap that up and the testers need to do all their reporting. The real question you're asking me is, when does LCS 1 go out on its first all-operational cycle of deployment? My suspicion is that would be more likely to occur sometime in 2013.
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