DDG 1000 Program Will End At Two Ships
By christopher p. cavas
Published: 22 Jul 19:01 EDT (23:01 GMT)
The once-vaunted Zumwalt-class DDG 1000 advanced destroyer program - projected in the late 1990s to produce 32 new ships and subsequently downscaled to a seven-ship class - will instead turn out only two ships, according to highly-placed sources in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.
Instead of more DDG 1000s, the U.S. Navy will continue to build more Arleigh Burke-class DDG 51 destroyers, construction of which had been slated to end in 2012. (Northrop Grumman)
Top U.S. Navy and Pentagon brass met July 22 to make the decision, which means the service will ask Congress to drop the request for the third ship in the 2009 defense budget and forego plans to ask for the remaining four ships.
Each of the two ships now under contract will be built, according to the new decision. That means the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard in Bath, Maine will build the Zumwalt, DDG 1000, and Northrop Grumman's Ingalls yard in Pascagoula, Miss., will construct the yet-to-be-named DDG 1001.
According to sources, the Navy also considered canceling the second DDG 1000 and building just one, but potentially high cancellation costs led to the decision to keep the ship.
The reprogramming decision was made at a conference July 22 hosted by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and attended by Navy Secretary Donald Winter, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead and Pentagon acquisition chief John Young.
Officials were busy throughout the day and into the evening making personal phone calls to senators, congressmen and government and industry officials notifying them of the decision. Initial reaction on Capitol Hill seemed to be largely positive.
The move appears to be based on fears that potential cost overruns on the Zumwalts - estimated to cost about $3.3 billion for each of the two lead ships - could threaten other Navy shipbuilding programs. The service declined comment on the July 22 decision, but in a statement released July 17, Navy spokesman Lt. Clay Doss provided some insight.
"We need traction and stability in our combatant lines to reach 313 ships, and we should not raid the combatant line to fund other shipbuilding priorities," Doss said. "Even if we did not receive funding for the DDG 1000 class beyond the first two ships, the technology embedded in DDG 1000 will advance the Navy's future surface combatants."
If the fears that rising costs could torpedo other new ships are indeed behind the decision, it is a tacit recognition that repeated warnings by budget experts from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Government Accountability Office that the ships face huge potential cost overruns - up to $5 billion each and more - were correct.
Ron O'Rourke of CRS testified March 14 before the House Seapower subcommittee that cost overruns on the first two ships could drive their combined cost to $10.2 billion - an increase of $3.9 billion. Using CBO's figures, O'Rourke pointed out that the remaining five ships, projected by the Navy to cost about $12.8 billion, would likely jump about $8 billion.
"The combined cost growth for all seven ships would be roughly $11.8 billion in then-year dollars, which is a figure roughly comparable to the total amount of funding in Shipbuilding and Conversion, Navy (SCN) appropriation account in certain recent years," O'Rourke testified at the hearing.
Publicly the Navy has long resisted the notion of building more DDG 51s, noting no more of the ships were needed - the class had been planned to end with the 62nd ship - and significant improvements to the design were hard to come by. But in March acting Navy acquisition chief John Thackrah told an audience that the service was looking at working in to the design a new SPY-3 radar to replace the current SPY-1 Aegis arrays, and the Navy also has studied fitting the 155mm Advanced Gun System into the DDG 51 hull. Both systems are part of the DDG 1000 design.
While it is not clear how many more 51s will be built, all sides seem in agreement that the majority of the hulls will go to Bath, which builds only destroyers. Northrop's Ingalls yard, in addition to destroyer construction, remains busy building three classes of amphibious ships and the Coast Guard's new National Security Cutter, and is still working to rebuild its infrastructure following damage from 2005's Hurricane Katrina.
"Bath will have to get the majority of these DDG 51s," said one source familiar with the situation. "They won't be able to go 50-50 with Pascagoula. Ingalls doesn't have the work force right now and Bath needs them."
Depending on the price of the new 51s, anywhere from 8 to 11 ships could be provided over the six-year future years defense plan. "They may continue to build these for the foreseeable future," the source said. "Nothing wrong with the hull, that is a good ship."
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So let's see: All teh costs in developing the DDG-1000 hull, and integrating it's electronic systems? All gone.
The ships will themselves be undeployable due to spares costs -- I've heard that we really only have two Seawolves operational, because the third is essentially the parts boat for the other two; since all the spare part contracts were programmed for a much larger buy, and when they were cut to just three boats, the spares program suffered horrendously.
As someone said on Warships1:
Please tell me this is a bad dream. The Navy leadership can't be as stupid as to cancel the DDG1000. Not only is it impossible for the Navy to buy Burke class destroyers for any where near what it paid for the last six units. The cancelation fees will add hundreds of millions to the cost of the two under contruction. Added to that is the addition cost it will add to CG(x), most likely in the billions of dollars because of the lost of technology cause by suppending production of all the systems developed for the Zumwalt class and other next generation ships.
And please don't tell me thay will use those system on the new destroyers. To do that means they would almost have to completly redesign them from the hull up, which I guarantee will cost as much do as the DDG1000 design work, and the only differnce between them will be that the new design will be less ablilies, less firepower, less survivablable, more costly to operated, and will last for only twenty years, because they won't be worth paying for a midlife refit.
Frankly this is just one more reason we need to abolish the Sec of Defence and return to seperate services. Under the current plan. civilian bureaucrates, who have no stake in getting weapon built, but every reason for preventing successful weapon programs, have taken over the Pentagon. The only solution for this problem is to abolish their power base and remove they permanently. This can only be done by returning weapons development and purchasing to the uniform services where the bean counter will be evaluated by hows well they support they follow serviceman and not how much money they can 'save' by crippling weapon development.
BTW I suspect the Navy will be 'surprised' when NG and GD both bid over 2 billion dollars each for the replacement destroyer, and that to keep the other yard from closing will cost a quarter billion a year. Of course they could get the Zumwalts for the same price, if the order them is groups of five or six like they did with the Burkes.
